Analyzing Classroom Interactions

The summer school is primarily intended for graduate students to early career researchers, but will be open to advanced undergraduate students who are willing to take on an inspiring challenge.
No specific prior knowledge or experience is required. Undergraduate students will need to have already acquired 120 ECTS in their bachelor programme.

It is expected that the participants have a sufficient command of the English language to actively participate in the discussions and to present their own work in English.

After this course you will be able to:

• describe the theoretical underpinnings of micro-analytic research on classroom interactions
• formulate your own research questions
• set up a design for research on classroom interactions
• analyze data on classroom interactions using state-of-the-art techniques

The workload is estimated at 56 hours, and includes participation in all summer school activities and preparation (reading all material, poster preparation).

A participation certificate can be arranged upon request to the coordinators. When submitting the request, participants should explicitly indicate if they did not attend one or more sessions.

During the summer school, you will have a chance to attend and take active part in lectures and workshops from leading experts. Techniques that will be addressed range from gathering and coding interactional data, to analyzing these data using qualitative and quantitative methods. Bringing in your own data for analysis and discussion is highly encouraged. Every day, there will be one or two lectures and workshops led by the different experts contributing to this summer school.

We start the week with a keynote lecture by Professor Aleksandar Baucal (University of Belgrade) setting the theoretical grounds for the summer school. We would also like to use the first day to get to know you and the project you are working on. During the second day, experts will guide you in all the particularities that are involved with coding interactional data in education. The third and fourth day will be concerned with the analysis of interactional data, by zooming in on quantitative as well as qualitative methods of analysis. The final day will be used to discuss your own projects in depth with one or more of the experts. In addition, this day will be dedicated to the translation of our research results to professional practice in education.

In sum, a whole week where we will cover the different stages involved in analyzing classroom interactions with the primary goal to hand you new knowledge, inspiration, and hands-on experience to apply on your own research project.

Myrte Gosen

Myrte Gosen is an Assistant Professor in Communication and Information Studies at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She received her Ph.D. from the same university in 2012. Her PhD dissertation is titled Tracing learning in interaction. An analysis of shared reading of picture books at kindergarten and shows a research interest at the interface between education and communication. She has a particular interest in classroom interactions in relation to knowledge and she uses the qualitative methodology of conversation analysis to identify the fundamental structures and practices in interaction that are related to knowledge construction. Amongst others, she is carrying out work to explore the interactional characteristics of (the development of) understanding of mathematics in primary education. Myrte is a member of the Centre of Expertise Interaction in Diverse classrooms.

Elisa Kupers

Elisa Kupers is an Associate Professor at the department of Special Needs Education and Youth Care at the University of Groningen. She obtained her PhD in 2014 in developmental psychology, with a thesis on scaffolding and autonomy in teacher-student interactions in individual music lessons. In order to capture the complexity of teacher-student interactions, she uses combinations of qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze data from various sources, such as observations and daily diaries. Currently, she is involved in various research projects with a focus on (special) educational needs, engagement, and creativity of both students and teachers. She is the chair of the University of Groningen Expertise Centre Interactions in Diverse Classrooms.

Mayra Mascareño Lara

Dr. Mayra Mascareño Lara is an assistant professor at the department of Educational Sciences, University of Groningen, with a PhD (cum laude) from the same university. Her work strives at understanding educational processes by obtaining a situated and ecologically valid examination of their emergence on a moment-to-moment basis across systems of development. Focused outcomes of development are, among others, language and literacy, and student engagement, with emphasis on students with diverse backgrounds (e.g., SES, multilingualism). A key feature of her research is the combination of observational approaches with novel and sophisticated methods of analysis, with the aim to capture the complexity of naturalistic educational processes. Mayra's work has a strong theoretical base on sociocultural and bioecological theories, and she has gathered a wide methodological expertise in quantitative and qualitative research methods. She is a member of the centre of expertise Interactions in the Diverse Classroom.

Naomi de Ruiter

Naomi de Ruiter is an Assistant Professor in Social Sciences at the University College Groningen of the University of Groningen. She completed her PhD (2015) in developmental psychology under the supervision of Paul van Geert and Saskia Kunnen at the University of Groningen. With her PhD, she proposed a theoretical framework of self-esteem as dynamically situated in parent-child interactions, and she tested the underlying claims of this framework in empirical studies of real-time parent-adolescent interactions. Since then, she has gone on to study naturalistic teacher-student interactions in the classroom in order to better understand how ability mindsets are situated in real-time interactions. This line of research is funded by a National Education Sciences postdoc grant (2016), conducted at Utrecht University. She has published her work in international journals in the field of developmental and social psychology, and has received various awards and acknowledgments for her research. She uses various timeserial methods to study the structure and content of moment-to-moment interactional processes, including Fractal analyses, State Space Grids, Kohonen’s Self-Organizing Maps, and T-patterns.

Frans Hiddink

Frans Hiddink is a Senior Teacher and Researcher at the Academy for Primary Education at the NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences. He has worked in teacher education since 2005 and has given lectures in a variety of subjects. The last couple of years his educational focus is on Early Childhood Education and on Dialogic Interaction in primary school classrooms. He completed his PhD at the University of Groningen (2019) in which he focused on problem-solving interactions between children (and their teacher) in Dutch kindergartens. His main research interest is how teachers use conversation as a tool for their professional practice. He has used discourse analysis and conversation analysis to investigate teacher-student interactions in whole class teaching and in group work, in either monolingual or multilingual settings. From 2022-2024, Frans leads an intervention project, funded by The Taskforce for Applied Research SIA. The aim of this intervention is to enhance emergent writing practices in peer play situations, by using joint reflections of video-recordings as part of an Educational Design Research.

Marijn van Dijk
Marijn van Dijk is professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Groningen. She studies processes of development and learning from a complexity approach. Specific topics are: language learning, parent-child and teacher-child interaction, reasoning, and feeding. Most studies concern repeated observations of behavior in naturalistic circumstances and the analysis of intra-individual variability. During the ACI-workshop, she will elaborate on studying classroom interactions from a complex dynamic systems perspective.

Henderien Steenbeek
Henderien Steenbeek is a developmental psychologist and works as a professor at the Hanze University for Applied Studies in Groningen. In addition, she is affiliated with the expertise group Developmental Psychology at the Heymans Institute for Psychological Research, University of Groningen. Her research focuses on the dynamics of students’ learning and behavioral processes in primary education, and the role of teachers in stimulating these processes.

To apply, kindly fill out the online application form. Please include the following documents with your application:

• CV (max 2 pages)
• Letter of motivation, explaining what you hope to learn during the summer school and why this will be important for your academic ambitions (max 1 page)
  

The application deadline is 1 April 2025. Participants will be informed of the outcome of the selection process by 18 April 2025.

Please note that you will get the most out of this summer school if you are working on or preparing a research project, such as a PhD project.

Please note that the summer school does not arrange housing. It is up to the participants to arrange this themselves.