Crossing divides: The legacy of Graham Nuthall

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Teaching and Teacher Education 22 (2006) 547–554

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Crossing divides: The legacy of Graham Nuthall

Alan Davis�

Department of Educational Psychology and Research Methods, School of Education and Human Development, University of Colorado at

Denver and Health Sciences Center, Campus Box 106, P.O. Box 173364, Denver, CO 80217-3364, USA

Abstract

Graham Nuthall’s work cuts across methodological and conceptual divides that have worked against the develop-

ment of a theory of learning and teaching that is at once predictive and practical. The micro-genetic approach to

research on learning in classrooms that he developed with Adrienne Alton-Lee successfully transcends the unhelpful

dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative methods. Crossing the borders between the individual focus of cognitive

psychology and the central role of social activity of sociocultural theory, he has suggested a synthesis that is both grounded

in social context and predictive of individual learning. His theoretical contribution can become still more useful by

extending it to the larger realities of students’ lives outside of the classroom by relating it to dynamic notions of culture and

identity.

r 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Learning processes; Memory; Microgenetic methods; Interactive process analysis; Sociocultural patterns; Classroom research

1. Introduction

I first became aware of the work of GrahamNuthall in 1993, when I was beginning a study withMark Clarke and Lynn Rhodes of three teacherswho taught using very different approaches, butwhose students (most of whom came from low-income families in the United States of AfricanAmerican and Latino ethnicity) had made remark-able gains on tests of reading and writing inprevious years (Clarke, Davis, Rhodes, & Baker,1996). We were using video cameras and remotemicrophones to study the three classrooms as socialsystems, with one camera focused on the teacher,and a second camera recording selected groups of

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students. I became aware that Graham Nuthall andhis student-become-colleague, Adrienne Alton-Leewere conducting detailed analyses of classroominteractions in New Zealand using video camerasand remote microphones. But their attention was onparticular students, and on studying in fine detailthe relationship between what those students saidand did, and what concepts they learned and did notlearn in science and social studies. My colleaguesand I were interested in the broader processes ofreading and writing, and my attention was increas-ingly on the social dynamics of classroom activities.The fact that three teachers using significantlydifferent approaches could achieve similarly positiveresults was evidence to me that the key to goodinstruction lay in sustaining focused student parti-cipation in activities through which studentslearned.

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ARTICLE IN PRESSA. Davis / Teaching and Teacher Education 22 (2006) 547–554548

Nuthall (2001b, p. 1–2) was respectfully critical ofthe focus on sustained participation in activity thatI and many others were pursuing:

Central to these theories is the belief thatteaching is most effective when students displaysigns of active interest and involvement inclassroom activities; when students look eager,ask questions, and do more work than isrequired. Implicit in the way teachers makemoment-by-moment (in-flight) decisions is thebelief that learning is a function of continuousinvolvement in appropriately structured andpaced activities. So long as the content is at anappropriate level of difficulty, learning is afunction of keeping students busy.

Nuthall was critical of studies of teaching asmanaging activity because they did not offer explicitand detailed evidence linking classroom experiencesto specific changes in what students knew and coulddo. What teachers most needed, he argued, are notprescriptions for teaching, or insights into how tokeep students engaged, but a sound understandingof how students learn. He believed it was possible todevelop ‘‘a description of an inter-related set ofcognitive and/or social processes or mechanismsthat explains how experience changes what studentsknow, believe, or can do’’ (Nuthall (2001b, p. 1). Hesought to contribute to explanatory theory—theorythat would describe ‘‘an underlying mechanism orprocess that connects, in a direct and unavoidableway, a cause with its effect’’ and was ‘‘directlyconnected to the observable realities of the contextin which it is being applied’’ (Nuthall, 2004, p. 276).

Nuthall (2001a, p. 24) also insisted that goodtheory should not be probabilistic, but shouldaccount for each and every participant in a study:

It means developing a precise and accurate, ifyou like, scientific or replicable, account of therealities of their experiences. In my view, thetruth lies in the detail. Every generalization wemake, every conclusion we draw, must be true ofevery individual. That is what ethically respon-sible research in education must be like.

The program of research Nuthall called for—anapproach to research on learning growing out of theepistemology of post-positivist realism (Phillips,2000) that seeks to describe sequential processeslinking causes and effects within interpretive con-texts—had to be qualitative in the sense that itsobservations were not decontextualized, reduced to

numbers, and aggregated. It also had to be detailedand systematic in its procedures, rely on low-inference data and allow for replication—featuresusually associated with quantitative approaches toresearch in education.

2. Transcending the qualitative–quantitative divide

To carry out this ambitious program of research,Nuthall and Alton-Lee developed a procedurewhich they refined in a series of at least 14connected studies. First, they met with a teacher inan upper-elementary grade in advance of a period ofinstruction lasting from 5 to 10 days involvingscience or social studies, and identified the conceptsthat the teacher wanted the students to understandand remember. They developed pre- and post-testsof those concepts, and administered pretests to theclass. Next, they randomly selected four or fivestudents in the class stratified by gender, ethnicity,and previous performance on standardized tests,and positioned video cameras and remote micro-phones to record to the extent possible everythingthe target children did and said during the period ofinstruction. At the end of the period of instruction,they administered written post-tests and also inter-viewed the target students on their understanding ofthe identified concepts. Then they created a set ofconcept files for each student, one for each conceptthe student encountered during the period ofinstruction. In that file they placed the time-codedtranscript segments and observational field notespertaining to the chronological experiences of thatchild associated with a particular concept, allowingthem to reconstruct a story or timeline of theprocess through which a child’s understanding of aconcept changed over time. Finally, they conductedfollow-up interviews a year later to determine whatchildren remembered (Nuthall, 2004).

From their analyses, Nuthall and Alton-Leedeveloped a method for predicting which of thestudents who initially had not been able todemonstrate understanding of a concept wouldexplain it correctly on the post-test, and of these,which ones would be able to still recall and explainit a year later. The data supported the inference thata representation of each encounter with concept-relevant information was stored in working memoryfor 2 days and then disappeared unless it couldattach itself to other representations relevant to thesame information (Nuthall, 1999, p. 311). When atleast four representations of relevant information

ARTICLE IN PRESSA. Davis / Teaching and Teacher Education 22 (2006) 547–554 549

had accumulated in working memory, a newknowledge construct was created from the integra-tion of those representations and transferred tolong-term memory (Nuthall, 1999, p. 312). Todetermine whether a representation should count,it had to be considered in context. Using thismethod, they were able to predict with at least 80%accuracy which students had learned which con-cepts by examining the record of the students’experiences in the classroom, consistent acrossmany studies (Nuthall, 1999, 2000a, b, 2001b, c,2002b, 2004)—an accomplishment unparalleled byclassroom researchers, to my knowledge. In fact,their process analysis predicted differences instudent learning so completely that standardizedtests of prior academic achievement accounted foressentially no additional variance (Nuthall, 2000b).

The method developed by Nuthall and Alton-Leehas its antecedents in the ‘‘experimental–genetic’’method pioneered by Vygotsky (1978). Vygotskyfocused his research on describing the processesthrough which changes in development take place,and he believed that experiments could make visibleprocesses that are ordinarily invisible by ‘‘telescop-ing’’ the actual course of development. To do this,he introduced obstacles into tasks that disruptedroutine methods of problem solving, or providedexternal aids to children at different ages underdifferent conditions of task difficulty, or set tasksbefore children that exceeded their knowledge andabilities. In each case, he recorded in detail howchildren proceeded with the task (Vygotsky, 1978,pp. 12–13)

In their use of the microgenetic method, Nuthalland Alton-Lee rejected both correlational and staticexperimental approaches to research and explana-tion that looked for associations among variablesbut did not describe a chronological chain of linkedevents. Nuthall’s notion of explanation was basedon revealing interactive processes occurring inchronological sequence, and it is for that reasonthat he and Alton-Lee insisted that it was importantto record classroom experience continuously ratherthan to sample it, and to describe the sequence ofexperiences separately for each student.

Nuthall and Alton-Lee apparently developedtheir methodology relatively independently of si-multaneous developments in cognitive psychologyand micro-ethnography. Early in the 1990s, Sieglerand Crowley (1991) described a microgeneticmethod for studying cognitive change, and Erickson(1992) described the ‘‘micro-analysis of interac-

tions’’ to discover sequential patterns in videorecordings of processes when their outcome isknown. Recently, Granott and Parziale (2002) haveadvanced the methodology of microgenetic analysisby identifying key dimensions of variation in itsdesign (e.g., concentrated vs. interspersed experi-ence, individual vs. socio-interactive experience,spontaneous vs. guided activity) as well as a rangeof approaches to such analysis. In the context of thiswork, Nuthall and Alton-Lee’s method can be seenas a variation within an established microgenetictradition.

A strong feature of their body of research is itscumulative progression across an extended sequenceof highly related studies. By alternating betweeninductive theory-building in an initial study, fol-lowed by deductive theory-testing and theory-refinement in subsequent studies, Nuthall andAlton-Lee developed an explanatory model thatwas highly consistent with a growing data set,analogous to the method of constant comparisondeveloped by Glaser and Strauss (1967), extendedacross many linked studies.

The exacting rigor of the method developed byNuthall and Alton-Lee stands in ironic contrast tothe ‘‘black box’’ logic of large-scale randomizedexperiments widely advocated in the United Statesas the preferred means of providing strong evidenceof causal relationships between teaching and learn-ing (cf. Slavin, 2002). Nuthall correctly insisted thatstudies comparing complex and multi-faceted ap-proaches to instruction through an analysis of testdata aggregated across both individuals and testitems obscures all of the contextual detail that couldyield insights into the processes through whichlearning takes place in classrooms (Nuthall, 2004).He pointed out that the logic of both large-scaleexperiments and de-contextualized correlationalstudies (including process–product studies of teach-ing) assumes that the observable features ofinstruction can be reduced to counts or aggregatedinto methods or ‘‘treatments’’, and that these in turncan be connected causally with student learning.The problem is that the link between an instruc-tional act and student learning depends on theconnection between that act and what a particularstudent already knows and can do, that student’sgoal or evaluative stance towards the activity, andthe sequence of actions leading up to the instruc-tional act (Nuthall, 2000b, pp. 24–25; Nuthall,2001b, p. 13). Research should strive for general-izability, he agreed, but generalizability can only be


at the level of actions-in-context, and not at the levelof specific behaviors or persons apart from contexts:

The specific set of behaviors that we use in onecontext may be quite different from those wewould use in other contexts in order to achievethe same end. What determines which set ofbehaviors we employ depends on our under-standing of the way different behaviors andcontexts interact with each other. For example,a teacher might use a sequence of closedquestions when reviewing what students havelearned and then change to more open, complexquestions when the time comes for the studentsto expand their knowledge. The feedback ateacher uses should vary depending on theteacher’s understanding of differences in indivi-dual students’ need for feedback. It is thisunderstanding of or theory about the wayteaching behaviors produce their effects ininteraction with different contexts that is general-izable and that teachers can apply in their owncontexts. (Nuthall, 2004, p. 285).

To generalize about the relationship betweenstudent ‘‘representations of encounters with aconcept’’ and the subsequent recall of that concepta year later, Nuthall used contextual clues fromtranscripts to count representations of encountersand used these to discover regularities, as describedabove. He always elaborated on these summaryrules-of-thumb with illustrative examples fromtranscripts so that the careful reader understoodthe application of the rule in context. His approachshould be required reading for both those whocontinue to claim that qualitative approaches ineducational research cannot provide strong evidenceof causal relationships, and for those who arguethat generalizable knowledge about human learningis impossible.

3. Transcending the individual vs. social divide

Graham Nuthall wrote a great deal about therelationship between the social and individualaspects of learning. After being strongly groundedin psychological perspectives on learning andteaching as a student at the University of Illinois,Nuthall became very interested in the prolificdevelopment of sociocultural theory in the 1990s,as represented in the work of such scholars as JeanLave, James Wertsch, Jay Lemke, and BarbaraRogoff, and the application of sociocultural and

sociolinguistic perspectives to research on class-rooms. In 1995, he wrote a chapter on research onclassrooms from social constructivist, sociocultural,and linguistic theoretical orientations, published thefollowing year in the International Handbook ofTeachers and Teaching (Nuthall, 1996, p. 51), inwhich he concluded that the interactive processes ofthe classroom constitute a system which cannot bereduced to the cognitive processes of the individualparticipants:

Classroom data cannot and should not bereduced to the purely psychological. The class-room is more than just the scene of manydifferent individual psychological causes andeffects. Its complexity gives it an order of beingthat is beyond the psychological, or the socio-logical, or the linguistic.yThe classroom is acomplex social and cultural system and thethinking and learning that occur there are afunction of the system as a whole, not thecollection of individual minds. The social pro-cesses are the cognitive processes.

In subsequent years, Nuthall clarified that, whilethe cognitive processes of individual students existin relationship to social processes, they are notidentical to social processes, any more than socialprocesses can be reduced to processes of individualcognition (Nuthall, 2002a). Nuthall drew onVygotsky’s (1978, p. 57) notion of internalization,the transformation of external activity, especiallysign-using activity, into internal representation, as afundamental metaphor for learning. In this respect,Nuthall distinguished himself from some contem-porary sociocultural theorists who rejected thenotion of internalization as implying a misleadingseparation between the individual and the social.Consider, for example, the position taken by Laveand Wenger (1991, p. 47):

Conventional explanations view learning as aprocess by which a learner internalizes knowl-edge, whether ‘‘discovered,’’ ‘‘transmitted’’ fromothers, or ‘‘experienced in interaction’’ withothers. This focus on internalization does notjust leave the nature of the learner, of the world,and of their relations unexplored; it establishes asharp dichotomy between inside and outside andsuggests that knowledge is largely cerebral.

In contrast to a process of internalization, Laveunderstood learning to be increasing participation


in a community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991,p. 49).

Nuthall expressed certain concerns with themetaphor of learning as participation in a commu-nity of practice or a community of learners. Hepointed to the importance of individual memory asthe continuing internal representations of experi-ence that form the basis of identity:

As communities and cultural tools have anidentity of their own across individuals, acrossoccasions, across settings, and across times, soindividuals have an identity of their own acrosssettings, across communities, across culturaltools and across times. In persons, it is themental representations of their experiences thatprovide the continuity that constitutes thisidentity. The individual mind provides theessential continuity between occasions and set-tings of sociocultural activity whether thatactivity is social or individual. Put another way,an individual may participate in many differentcommunities and play several different roleswithin those communities. The individual maybe partly a different person in each differentsetting, but will also be partly the same person.Personal representations of experience are car-ried by individuals from one setting or commu-nity to another and influence the enactmentof social roles in individual ways. (Nuthall, 1996,p. 52).

He also expressed concern that by focusing onlearning as participation in social activity withoutattending explicitly to changes in what individualsknow and can do, many researchers drawing on asociocultural orientation were failing to provideevidence that would move teachers beyond thepopular but simplistic image of the actively engagedand broadly participatory classroom as the model ofgood teaching (Nuthall, 2002a).

Using class discussion as an example, Nuthall(2002a) argued that students who are physicallypresent during a class discussion participate in verydifferent ways. Some may not be listening and arefocused on other matters. Some are engaged in pro-forma participation without attending deeply towhat other students are saying. Some, because ofdifferences in background knowledge, misunder-stand the contributions of others and come awaywith erroneous interpretations. In short, participa-tion means different things from the perspectiveof different students, and different students learn

different things. If studies of participation are toprovide enduring and useful knowledge, they mustmove beyond descriptive and critical analysis andreveal the nature of causal processes linkingpatterns of participation to learning.

4. Bringing culture into the model

What seems missing in Nuthall’s work, fromwhere I sit in the heart of a city in the westernUnited States concerned about the low graduationrates and test scores of youth who participate inAfrican American and immigrant Latino culturalcommunities, is any overt attention to culture andidentity. In the transcripts made by Nuthall andAlton-Lee of 5th year students in New Zealandinterpreting experiments on the refraction of light orwondering how a compass points when one walksnear the South Pole, there is little that reminds meof the classrooms made up mostly of somewhatolder immigrant and African American studentsthat I spend my time with here. Granted, Nuthallpurposefully included ethnic diversity in his sam-pling of target students. But I am not referring toethnicity, nor to culture as a static category, butinstead to histories of participation in dynamiccommunities with evolving common traditions andunderstandings (Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003).

The over-arching impression from these tran-scripts is one of smooth-running classrooms popu-lated by students who are at least moderatelyinterested in what the teacher wants them to learnand complying with her instructions. In that respect,they do not remind me much of the middle schoolwhere I spent much of the last 3 years, where nearly25% of the students were sent home for severedisciplinary infractions, often involving fightingduring school or refusing to participate and activelydisrupting activities organized by the teacher. Thesort of theory that would be most valuable to theteachers I work with would bring together under-standing how students learn with knowledge of howto recast learning activities to draw upon thecompetencies, repertoires, and emerging identitiesthat students bring into the classroom. Whenchallenges to the flow of activity appear to beisolated and local, we treat them as problems ofmotivation or classroom management. When itbecomes apparent that they are pervasive and revealregularities across national boundaries (Gibson &Ogbu, 1991), we must recognize that larger systemsare involved.


Throughout his work, Nuthall emphasized theimportant relationship between students’ purposesfor engaging in learning activities, and the resultinglearning. Purpose (conscious intent) is noted in hiswork in two ways. One is the way in whichindividual students manage their own learning.A second way involves the interactions among peersin the classroom as they negotiate the meaning oftheir joint activity. I will argue that what is missingfrom Nuthall’s perspective is attention to the larger,longer-term affiliations of students that transcendthe classroom or a particular year of schooling—thesocial identities and visions of future selves thathave bearing on the moment-to-moment choices ofstudents to learn about the refraction of light or tosketch an anime cartoon figure in their notebook.

One of Nuthall’s findings is that much of thedifference in what different students learn is relatedto decisions individual students make about mana-ging their own experiences.

yDifferences in what students learn in the sameclassrooms are created by differences in theactivities that they select and the activities thatthey generate for themselves. This, in turn,suggests that differences in motivation andinterest are the primary cause of differences inwhat students learn. Those students who aremost interested in the topic, or most stronglymotivated to find out more about it, are theones who learn most regardless of apparentdifferences in academic aptitude. (Nuthall,2000b, p. 15).

In Nuthall’s studies, students who were ‘‘inter-ested’’ in a topic searched through texts for moreinformation, asked clarifying questions, checkedtheir notes, and recognized when something theyhad written was inconsistent or did not make sense.Other students were not bothered if they did notunderstand a concept or if their answer did not seemto make sense. Teachers everywhere are familiarwith this distinction. Students’ willingness to learn isa prerequisite for learning, and it is not possible toreveal processes of learning without consideringwhat students want to do. As a case in point, in theprocess of reviewing the use of micro-geneticanalysis in cognitive psychology, I recently cameacross a study (Johnson & Mervis, 1994) in whichthe researchers studied the earliest transitionalstages in children in the acquisition of expertise,in this case knowledge of shorebirds. The studywas conducted in children’s homes, but ended up

including only girls, because boys became ‘‘distrac-tible’’ when presented with the activity, whereasgirls ‘‘tended to enjoy playing the game’’ (p. 420).

Nuthall found that peer interactions played acritical role in student learning: ‘‘From our data itseems that the peer interaction and relationshipsystem is by far the most pervasive in determininghow and when students engage with classroomactivities’’ (Nuthall, 2000b, p. 55). Students suppliedone another with information and suggestions,encouraged or rebuffed one another, and supportedor disparaged one another’s efforts.

The relationships between the students, thematch or mismatch between their respective rolesand status, their abilities to negotiate help or co-operation between each other, and the tensionsbetween their need to work together within thegroup and their need to sustain their relation-ships with others outside the group, all shapedhow the activity was carried out. (Nuthall, 2000b,p. 46.)

In making these observations, Nuthall links theprocesses through which particular concepts andprocedures are internalized by individuals, and thelarger social processes that shape and constrain themoment-to-moment encounters of students withconcepts.

But those larger social processes do not begin orend at the classroom door. Early adolescents, forexample, come to the classroom as participants inongoing ‘‘figured worlds’’ (Holland, Lachicotte,Skinner, & Cain, 2001), some local and fleeting,others slower-changing cultural communitieswith multi-generational histories in which theydevelop linguistic and cultural–historical repertoires(Gutierrez & Rogoff, 2003). Youth tell narratives toothers and to themselves asserting who they are andhow they came to be that way. Sfard and Prusak(2005) define these narratives as identity when theyare reifying, endorsable, and significant.

In the classroom, it is useful to recognize culturalrepertoires and identity narratives as importantmediating tools and constraints for activity. Whenthe curriculum is viewed as culture-neutral, class-room goals and activities almost inevitably reflectthe normative assumptions of the dominantgroup, and the repertoires and competenciesarising in other cultural communities remain fallowand unrecognized (Heath, 1983; Lee, Spencer, &Harpalani, 2003). By adjusting activities and learn-ing goals to capitalize on students’ out-of-school


repertoires, the nature of students’ representationsof encounters with concepts (Nuthall’s term) may bechanged. Identity narratives function similarly asmediating resources and constraints to participa-tion. For example, in the United States, someAfrican American youth have, in various contexts,declared that reading poetry was ‘‘acting white,’’while performing rap was consistent with their senseof self (Fordham, 1999). Teachers who take theseidentity narratives into account, and even addressthem directly (Davis, 2004), can lead students toredefine their relationship to an activity.

These suggestions are intended to be extensions,and not alternatives, to Nuthall’s quest to discoverprocesses through which student experiences areconnected to specific evidence of learning. At theheart of Nuthall’s theory of learning is the claimthat what matters are sequences of interactive eventsand their relationship to changes in what studentsknow and can do. Evidence of his accomplishmentis the finding that when the sequence of eventsis known, ‘‘ability’’ adds no additional predictabil-ity. I would maintain that the same is true for‘‘culture,’’ and ‘‘identity,’’ when these concepts areconceived of as essential attributes of persons ratherthan dynamic processes. Recognizing them asprocesses taking place over extended time scales(Lemke, 2000; Sfard & Prusak, 2005, p. 16) allowsthem to be incorporated into a dynamic theory oflearning, serving as mediating means and con-straints for the faster-moving processes of class-room activity.

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Crossing divides: The legacy of Graham Nuthall

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