Research Findings
In most classrooms, students are typically given less than one second to respond to a question posed by a teacher. Research shows that under these conditions students generally give short, recall responses or no answer at all rather than giving answers that involve higher-level thinking. Studies beginning in the early 1970s and continuing through the 1980s show that if teachers pause between three and seven seconds after asking higher-level questions, students respond with more thoughtful answers and that science achievement is increased. This finding is consistent at the elementary, middle school, and high school levels and across the science disciplines.
However, some research studies have suggested that the benefits of increasing wait time may depend on factors such as student expectations and the cognitive level of the questions. In a study of increased wait time in a high school physics class, students became more apathetic in classes where the wait time was increased. This might have occurred because this strategy did not match students' expectations of how a high school physics course should be conducted. In a study at the elementary level, a decrease in achievement was attributed to waiting too long for responses to low-level questions.
In the Classrooms
Increasing the wait time from three to seven seconds results in an increase in: 1) the length of student responses, 2) the number of unsolicited responses, 3) the frequency of student questions, 4) the number of responses from less capable children, 5) student-student interactions, and 6) the incidence of speculative responses. In addition to pausing after asking questions, research shows that many of these same benefits result when teachers pause after the student's response to a question, and when teachers do not affirm answers immediately.
Increasing wait time also increases science achievement, and students' participation in inquiry. Research indicates that when teachers increase their wait time to more than three seconds in class discussions, achievement on higher-cognitive-level science test items increases significantly. This holds for test items involving content, the process skills, and items involving probabilistic reasoning.
However, care must be taken in applying wait time judiciously. The optimal wait time for a given question should be adjusted to the cognitive level of the question, and students' responses should be carefully monitored.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Journal Articles - To access most of these Journal Articles, you must be a student, faculty or staff member at an OhioLINK affiliated institution. Access to OhioLINK may be available to Ohioans through their local, public, or school libraries. Contact OPLIN, INFOhio, or your local library for more information.
//www.ericdigests.org/1995-1/think.htm
Links to a document that discusses the concepts of "Think-Time" and "Wait-Time". It includes a section on the skillful use of Think-Time.
//eric.ed.gov/
Investigated effects of increasing middle school teachers' wait time on general questioning skills in science teaching. Four groups (10 teachers each) were used: control; group receiving printed guides on discussion/techniques; group using an electronic feedback device; group using both guides and feedback device. Results, conclusions, and implications are reported.
//eric.ed.gov/
A paper explaining an experiment using two Middle School science teachers with Wait Time as one of the variables in the experiment. The results indicated that using a mean teacher wait-time of approximately three seconds and ensuring may increase achievement that students are maximally engaged on the instructional objectives.
//adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1983JRScT..20..721S
This links to an abstract from a 1983 publication showing the interaction of Wait Time feedback and Questioning instruction on science teaching at the Middle School level.
Websites
//www.nwrel.org/scpd/sirs/3/cu5.html
Embedded in Cotton's article, Classroom Questioning, are research findings supporting the use of wait time as a classroom questioning technique. She gives helpful suggestions for increasing wait time to facilitate students' thinking and learning.
//www.teachervision.fen.com/teaching-methods/new-teacher/48446.html
This essay, Your Secret Weapon: Wait Time, likens wait time to percolation time - good coffee needs time to brew just like the generation of good ideas in students' heads needs the proper "brewing" time.
//home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~seifert/wait.time.paper.html
Seifert questions, Is There a Best "Wait Time"?, in this short essay. The researcher used Internet communication to help students to assess the idea of "wait time".
How can teachers work more slowly to elicit more thinking from students?
It makes sense to slow down a little and give students a chance to think. The longer you wait, the better the reward…
In the complicated and busy world of the classroom, how can teachers ‘teach slowly’ in order to reap more benefits in the classroom? I’ve returned to her research paper to learn if there is anything else teachers can adopt from her work.
To do this well takes many years of practise. There are many questioning strategies that can help teachers do this on their feet, developing a range of question types to hold students to account for their learning. Examples include pose, pause, pounce bounce; cold call, no opt out and fermi questioning for example.
The ‘wait’ or ‘pause’ is a key phase in any process you use.
When teachers ask students questions, they typically wait less than one second for a student response. Further, after a student stops speaking, teachers react or respond with another question in less than one second. The concepts of wait time 1 (pausing after asking a question) and wait time 2 (pausing after a student response) are discussed.
Impact on students?
To determine what impact teacher questioning had on students, Rowe documented the astonishing speed at which teacher and student exchanges took place. “I fed the sound from the tapes into a servo-chart plotter…” which plots the speech patterns and pauses.
- Wait time: the accumulation of pauses between student utterances before the teacher speaks again, in most of the recordings averaged 0.9 seconds!
- Quick reactions by teachers appeared to cut off student elaboration.
Recommendations
Rowe writes that teachers “in their eagerness to elicit responses from students, teachers often develop verbal patterns that make the achievement of wait time 2 unnecessarily difficult.”
Most, if not all, teachers will recognise this, particularly under observation. Rowe recommends that teachers who “stabilize longer wait time patterns” can reap the following three benefits in class:
- Teachers’ responses exhibit greater flexibility. This is indicated by the occurrence of fewer discourse errors and greater continuity in the development of ideas.
- The number and kind of questions asked by teachers changes
- Expectations for the performance of certain students seem to improve.
Simple fixes for teachers could include responding to students with some of the following scripts:
- “Yes, and…”
- “Tell me why you think this…”
- “What else?…”
- “Explain to me how…”
If we factor in a wide range of learning needs, then this simple classroom strategy becomes more nuanced and requires many more conditions for it to be successful. For example, effective behaviour management, subject knowledge and personal confidence. Rowe ends with a quote from a poem that gives teachers some reassurance: “We cannot leave it to the scientists – nor any form of government – each individual must fuse a philosophy with a plan of action.”
Unfortunately, it is difficult for many people to get average wait times up to 3 seconds or longer. However, we must try if we wish to reduce cognitive load and increase a degree of self-regulation.
Download the paper.
“Wait time is the period of silence between the time a question is asked and the time when one or more students respond to that question.” (TeacherVision, 2015)
It is necessary to give students some time to think about the questions and formulate a response. Even though it can feel like you have been waiting forever for an answer, or even just some small sign that they heard you, in reality it was probably less than one second. On average, teachers only wait 0.7 and 1.4 seconds after asking a question (Stahl, 1994). Try counting to at least three in your mind (one mis-sis-sip-pi, two mis-sis-sip-pi, etc) before repeating the question or rewording it. Nobody wants to turn into the economics teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Most students will take anywhere from 1 to 10 seconds to process a question and find link the correct information to it. As such it is also a good idea to wait after getting a response to let the other students process the answer as well.
So how long should you wait?
This depends on the complexity of the question, the ability of the students and the clarity with which the question was asked. In general, recall and lower-level questions will take most students 1-3 seconds to answer. Questions that require calculation, such as 11 x 3, usually take 4-6 seconds to generate a response. Higher-order questions that require more thought than the simple recall questions, could take anywhere from 6 to 10 seconds to formulate a reply.
Benefits to waiting longer
In 1972, Mary Budd Rowe published a paper summarising five years of study into wait times. She observed that when teachers allowed at least 3 seconds of wait time, there were a number of positive changes in the classroom.
“There are increases in the length of the response, the number of unsolicited appropriate responses, student confidence, incidence of speculative responses, incidence of child-child data comparisons, incidence of evidence-inference statements, frequency of student questions, and incidence of responses from “relatively slow” students. The number of teacher questions which do not elicit a response decreases.” (Rowe, 1972)
By waiting longer for a response, a teacher will involve more class members, get better quality answers and students are more likely to ask their own questions.
REFERENCES
Rowe, M B 1972, “Wait-Time and Rewards as Instructional Variables: Their Influence on Language, Logic, and Fate Control” in Resources in Education, Education Resources Information Center, Presented at the National Association for Research in Science Teaching, Chicago, Illinois, April 1972, viewed on 17 April 2015, //eric.ed.gov/?id=ED061103
Simonds, C J and Cooper, P J 2014, Communication for the Classroom Teacher, 9th edn, Allyn & Bacon of Pearson Education Ltd, Glenview, USA
Stahl, R J 1994, ‘Using “Think-Time” and “Wait-Time” Skillfully in the Classroom. ERIC Digest.’ Viewed on 15 April 2015, //files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED370885.pdf
TeacherVision 2015, Your Secret Weapon: Wait Time, Teaching Methods and Strategies, TeacherVision, viewed on 15 April 2015, //www.teachervision.com/teaching-methods/new-teacher/48446.html
Tsiorvas, A 2015, EDMT903 Communication for Teachers, Lecture 2, Week 3: Questioning, Listening and Feedback, lecture Powerpoint Slides, viewed on 20 March 2015, //moodle.uowplatform.edu.au/
Video: Ferris Bueller’s Day off: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhiCFdWeQfA&feature=youtu.be
Video: Positively MAD Teaching Tip #7:Questioning Skills: Wait Time: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfUSNBTQxaM
Image: Alice in Wonderland, The White Rabbit: //katespencer17.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/white-rabbit-watch.png
Image: Girl Thinking: //www.internationalstudentinsurance.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/thinking167230135.jpg