Conversation Analytic innovation for Teacher Education (CAiTE)


How can we train student teachers to be effective in their assessment practices? The CAiTE project aims to enhance the quality of teacher education and improve teachers' assessment practices.

Project summary

The CAiTE project aims to enhance the quality of teacher education and improve teachers' assessment practices by developing, evaluating and implementing a new research-based instruction method, based on the principles of CARM (Conversation Analytic Role-play Method), to train student teachers' feedback skills.

The instruction method is based on an anonymized video material of oral exams and teachers' guidance of students in the classroom in 10th grade and VG3. Participants in a CARM workshop watch and listen to anonymized audio and video clips of assessment practices accompanied by transcripts. The transcripts are delivered line-by-line, enabling student teachers to 'live through' actual practice without knowing what happens next. The students then discuss what they might do next to handle the situation, and then evaluate what the actual teacher did.

Their own learning is scaffolded by organizing the CARM training such that it presents what works, as well as what is less effective.

The project addresses the following research questions: (1) what guiding principles for formative assessment are currently used in teacher training and how does actual practice reflect this guidance; (2) what characterizes effective and non-effective interactional strategies in teachers' feedback interaction; (3) in what ways can the results from conversation analytic studies best inform and underpin teacher training, and (4) what are the learning outcomes, in terms of self-efficacy, of implementing CARM in teacher education?


Preliminary findings show that guidelines for feedback and supervision are experience-based and lack theoretical and empirical grounding. Empirical analyzes of oral exams show that there is considerable variation in time spent on the various parts of oral exams. There is considerable variation in the number of questions asked and topics covered in the professional discussions between examiners and candidates.

The examiners’ open, leading and multiple questions during the oral examination provide strong guidelines for what it is possible to answer, and these questions can have both a scaffolding-building and inhibiting effect on the candidates' opportunities to demonstrate competence. When the candidates display trouble in answering question, the examiners try to help by posing reformulated follow-up questions and give hints. By pursuing responses this way the examiners give candidates a new possibility to show knowlegde, but does not necessarily enable the candidate to give an apposite answer.

Analyzes of teachers' guidance in the classroom show how teachers initiate, pursue and solve problems via verbal, prosodic and physical resources. The teacher's presence and movement in the room are important for the students' opportunities to receive guidance. The pilot of the intervention, autumn 2019, showed that the teacher students were mostly satisfied with the content and relevance of the course and ranked themselves relatively high on self-efficacy at the end of the course.

CARM workshop for teacher students

Based on conversational analyzes of oral exams and teachers' supervision of group work in the classroom, the project has developed and piloted a CARM workshop for teacher students.

A revised version of the intervention and evaluation was carried out as a randomized control study in October 2020. This study controls for other factors than the intervention, by presenting the intervention to two groups of teacher students at two different time points, with evaluations before and during the intervention period. Results will be presented during 2021 and 2022.


  • Sikveland, Rein Ove, Solem, Marit Skarbø, & Skovholt, Karianne. (2021). How teachers use prosody to guide students towards an adequate answer. Linguistics and Education, 61, Linguistics and education, 2021-02, Vol.61.
  • Solem, Marit Skarbø, & Skovholt, Karianne. (2020). Retningslinjer for vurderingssamtaler: Første delrapport fra forskningsprosjektet CAiTE (Conversation Analytic innovation for Teacher Education). 
  • Skovholt, Karianne (2020). Muntlig eksamen truer elevers rettsikkerhet., 09.03.2020.

Trening av samtaleferdigheter i lærerutdanningen (CAiTE)

Core research team

The project is financed by The Research Council of Norway (NFR) through the FINNUT-programme and consists of 5 researchers and two PhD.


University College of Southeast Norway, Faculty of Humanities, Sports and Educational Science

Loughborough University

Loughborough University, Department of Social Sciences

Collaborating projects

LOaPP: Learning Outcome across Policy and Practice (Læringsutbytte i politikk og praksis)