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Many large introductory classes are taught in stadium-style classrooms, which makes group work more difficult due to the room layout and immobile seating. These classrooms may create challenges for an instructor who wants to monitor student engagement because the layouts make it difficult to interact with the students as they work. Student nonverbal actions, such as eyes on the paper or an unsettled gaze, can be used to determine when students are actively engaged during group work. While other methods have been implemented to determine student actions during a class period, in larger settings these protocols require time-consuming data collection and cannot give in-the-moment feedback. In this study, student verbal and nonverbal interactions were analyzed and compared to determine the types of nonverbal interactions students take when collaboratively engaging in group work during lectures. It was found that a larger variety of nonverbal interactions, such as gesturing and leaning, were used when students were collaboratively working within their groups. Instructors of large enrollment classrooms can use the results of this work to aid in their facilitation of group work within stadium-style classrooms. 

The classroom environment is shaped by factors such as facilitation style, curricular design, and classroom layout. These factors are all inputs into student framing of the classroom environment and affect a student’s comfort interacting within it. Promoting student discourse in active learning environments provides students the opportunity to explain their thinking and develop their understanding of natural phenomena. However, successfully implementing these practices in large lecture environments is often difficult. Undergraduate introductory chemistry lectures were investigated to identify the effects that instructional practices had on student engagement. Instructor facilitation, question level, and student interactions were analyzed and compared to provide insights into what instructional practices may promote or hinder student engagement in a large enrollment course. Overall instructors were positioning themselves as an authority on knowledge in the classroom by leading questions authoritatively like instructor-focused didactic lecturing that led to a decrease in student engagement. These results highlight the complexity of the classroom ecosystem related to student interactions and the role that facilitation plays in social and cognitive engagement. 

Abstract Student-centered instruction allows students to take ownership over their learning in the classroom. However, these settings do not always promote productive engagement. Using discourse analysis, student engagement can be analyzed based on how they are interacting with each other while completing in-class group activities. Previous analyses of student engagement in science settings have used methods that do not capture the intricacies of student group interactions such as the flow of conversation and nature of student utterances outside of argumentation or reasoning. However, these features are important to accurately assess student engagement. This study proposes a tiered analytical framework and visualization scheme for analyzing group discussion patterns that allow for a detailed analysis of student discourse moves while discussing scientific topics. This framework allows a researcher to see the flow of an entire conversation within a single schematic. The Student Interaction Discourse Moves framework can be used to extend studies using discourse analysis to determine how student groups work through problems.