Student uptake of whole class instructional talking points in their writing

Data are from a two-year ethnographic study of a diverse, urban classroom community of seven-and-eight-year-olds in the US. Research interest is in student uptake in their writing as a marker of learning. We want to know whether, and how, students who have routinely experienced exploratory talk about instructional points, take up these points in their writing a few weeks later. We examine a class set of writing for evidence. By student uptake we mean the appearance of a teaching point in individually written student stories. We apply nine uptake codes and report descriptive statistics for student stories (N=17) and take a qualitative look at 6 stories. We found widespread and consistent uptake of instructional points.