Effectiveness has received bad press in Dialogic Education as it generally points to improvements in a stable educational context, while dialogic pedagogies aim at educational change. The present paper examines effectiveness in senses that are compatible with both the educational system and the aims of Dialogic Education. Institutional and organizational constraints limit the implementation of practices such as peer-led computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) discussions in schools. In an intervention that handled these constraints, we compared the outcomes of small-group peer-led CSCL discussions around texts and teacher-led whole-class face-to-face discussions around the same texts. The outcomes compared were individual historical essays. We relied on a methodological tool developed by Monte-Sano (2016) to measure two qualitative aspects of students' essays: argumentation and historical reasoning. Two groups of high-school students (N1 = 24; N2 = 21) participated in discussions around historical texts. The second author, who was the group's teacher, facilitated a discussion with the first group. The second group was divided into small groups, which interacted through a CSCL tool. There was no significant difference in the quality of essays written after participation in a peer-led dialogue through a CSCL tool, compared to those written after participation in a teacher-led face-to-face discussion – in terms of either argumentation or historical reasoning. However, the students who participated in peer-led collaborative dialogue did reveal distinctive epistemological insights. These results have had implications for the Ministry of Education's policy, which recently recognized this measure of essay quality as part of the history matriculation exam. In addition, the analysis of the peer-led CSCL group discussions suggests that a dialogical space was created. The intervention was thus effective in terms of standardized learning outcomes, dissemination of new dialogic practices, and ontological-dialogical changes.
Schwarz et al. (Thu,) studied this question.