[4] His study "Questions in Time" with Wu, Gamoran, Zeiser, and Long was the first use of event-history analysis to investigate classroom discourse.
[citation needed] Nystrand's work has successfully introduced several seminal concepts in current research: Nystrand’s theory of writing posits that written communication is governed by reciprocity between writers and readers, and his model outlines the textual "moves" that writers make vis-à-vis readers in order to initiate and sustain their interaction.
[19] Indeed, as Schmandt-Besserat shows,[20] this seems to have been the case as long ago ancient Mesopotamia when in the late fourth millennium BCE, the cuneiform script was invented in the Near East to accommodate a new expanding and expansive commercial class of trading.
Later in mid- to late-eighteenth century Britain, as Miller shows,[21] composition and rhetoric first gained traction in provincial colleges, not elite universities like Cambridge and Oxford (where Latin was the principal medium of instruction).
[22] In this way, the new professional classes of the industrial world were to be given "a quite direct preparation of the work habits and thought patterns that are needed to function in any of the 'varied calls of life.
The Johnson administration vigorously sought to increase educational opportunities as a key weapon in its War on Poverty, and by the late 1960s, a new community college opened every week.
[25] The woeful inadequacy of freshman composition instructors to meet this challenge prompted new research, notably that of Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations, published in 1977,[26] who, influenced by Labov's "The logic of non-standard English," published in 1969,[27] sought to show patterns and unconventional patterns in what the critics of the schools saw as so much sloppiness and ignorance.
Nystrand’s companion computer program, CLASS[32][33][34][35][36][37] provides a number of measures designed to assess the quality of interaction between teachers and their students.
[citation needed] Nystrand is currently working in collaboration with colleagues at the Institute for Intelligent Systems to develop a computer program to autonomously measure and assess classroom discourse as it affects student achievement.
Particularly, Nystrand and his colleagues are creating a system that autonomously processes classroom discourse allowing teachers do-it-yourself professional development.