How changes in teachers' dialogic discourse practice relate to changes in students' activation, motivation and cognitive engagement

Abstract Dialogic practices encourage students to actively participate in productive classroom discourse. In this paper, we investigate whether changes in teachers' dialogic discourse practice are related to students' perceived activation, motivation and cognitive engagement on a sample of 450 high-school students. Nineteen teachers participated in a 1-year professional development program that was designed to help teachers adopt a more dialogic discourse practice. The extent to which teachers changed their discourse practice varied between teachers and some teachers did not change their practice. Results suggest that students whose teachers changed their discourse practice reported higher levels of perceived activation at the end of the program. Moreover, longitudinal multilevel modeling revealed that students perceived stronger increases in their autonomy support, competence support and cognitive engagement when teachers changed their discourse practice. The paper highlights the important role of dialogic discourse from a motivational perspective.