Ming Chiu
SUNY Buffalo
Research
- How teachers' and classmates' social metacognitive processes affect classroom conversations
- To analyze these conversations, he invented a statistical discourse analysis method (Dynamic Multilevel Analysis)
- uses DMA to model how recent sequences of teacher and student actions (micro-time context) influence the characteristics of each student action at each conversation turn. Using DMA, he can also identify watershed events (breakpoints) that radically change the classroom conversation, and divide it into significantly different time periods. For example, three types of breakpoints (creative ignitors, creative dampeners, and on-task ↔ off-task transitions) divided students' group problem solving processes into high and low micro-creativity time periods. Lastly, DMA can test whether the effects differ across time periods, students, teachers, or classrooms.
- Inequality mechanisms that reduce the learning of both rich and poor students
- Many studies have shown that greater economic inequality widens the mathematics achievement gap among the richest and the poorest students. Extending this line of research, Chiu has shown that three types of inequality (family inequality, school inequality, and schoolmate inequality) reduced both rich and poor students' learning in 41 countries. Next, he plans to examine the inequality mechanisms responsible for these results. Possible candidates include weaker student solidarity, fewer educational resources, weaker student discipline, and diminishing marginal returns. He is testing these hypotheses on primary school and high school students in other countries, using several large international data sets (e.g., PIRLS, PISA).
