Transactivity Despite Complexity: Promoting Group Discussions in the Context of Socioscientific Issues

Abstract There is a need for support in addressing complex socio-scientific issues (SSIs) in science lessons. Therefore, this study analyzes the quality of students’ group discussions against the background of functionally varying degrees of instruction to enhance both complexity management and broad participation. The instructional approach comprises a process-structuring tool, target-mat, as the core of the teaching strategy. The corresponding intervention was conducted in 29 group discussions regarding a local biodiversity conflict among 8th-grade students. On the basis of qualitative content analysis and subsequent code quantification, the results indicate that directly instructed discussion activities, such as compliance with discussion phases, were successfully realized. In addition, discussion activities that were not explicitly instructed, such as active participation and referring to peers’ statements in terms of transactivity, were, nevertheless, frequently observed. Furthermore, the frequency of these noninstructed activities correlates significantly with the controversial character of the discussion topic. These results are attributed to the balanced combination of guided and student-directed activities and are interpreted as core features of discussion quality. The implications for teaching and educational research are discussed.