Conceptualising a science toolkit for systematic educational dialogue analysis (SciT-SEDA): A holistic approach

Classroom dialogue is known to be linked to students’ learning outcomes. However, in the science education literature, there is no theoretical tool to characterise types of dialogues that specifically foster students’ disciplinary literacy and practices. Equipping science educators with a disciplinary coding scheme can enhance teachers’ competence in orchestrating productive classroom dialogue. Extending from the Toolkit for Systematic Educational Dialogue Analysis (T-SEDA), we constructed a SciT-SEDA that characterises domain-specific and domain-general dialogues through iterative analysis and examination of classroom data of four teachers, two of whom had received formal teacher training in science education while the other two had not. SciT-SEDA encompasses 20 dialogue categories that are distributed across 4 general themes regarding their functions in relation to dialogic space. We provide evidence that SciT-SEDA is sensitive in identifying differences between trained and untrained teachers. Hence, we propose that SciT-SEDA can be incorporated into teacher training programs that build science teachers’ competence in orchestrating classroom dialogue in promoting students’ disciplinary literacy and practices. Copyright © 2025 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.