Abstract

Gregory reports on an evaluation study of nine different educational programs for small-group discussion, funded by the US Department of Education. The researchers evaluated Philosophy for Children very highly on each of the five discourse features: (1) Teachers' and students' use of authentic questions, uptake and questions that elicited high-level thinking (generalization, analysis and speculation); (2) Teachers' and students' use of questions that elicited extra-textual connections (affective, intertextual, and shared knowledge); (3) Students' elaborated explanations; (4) Students' exploratory talk; and (5) Use of "reasoning words" such as "because," "so," "if," "I think," "dis/ agree," in contexts of verbal reasoning.