Background: Online discussion is one of the commonly used tools to enhance students' interactions and engagements in online courses, but it is not clear how social presence in online discussions impacts students' learning and what kinds of interactions we should encourage. Social network analysis provides a new methodology to investigate how…

Disinformation has become a core concept in communications research, related to media, technological and political phenomena that complexify its definition and diagnosis. Although its approach has been mainly quantitative, focus groups have also been used to understand the perception of the audience of this particular issue. This research is part…

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are purely online learning environments that are typically available for free for anyone with internet access. These courses have attracted hundreds of thousands, if not millions of learners around the world and the number of users has increased rapidly along with the growth of new platforms and a wide diversity…

Despite the potential of learning analytics (LA) to support teachers' everyday practice, its adoption has not been fully embraced due to the limited involvement of teachers as co-designers of LA systems and interventions. This is the focus of the study described in this paper. Following a design-based research (DBR) approach and guided by concepts…

Shared meaning-making across differences in today's polarized society requires a socio-political perspective toward conceptualizing and operationalizing collaborative competence. Thus, there is a pressing need for socio-political pedagogies and designs in CSCL to empower students as cultural-historical agents who can communicate and work…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide learners with high-quality learning resources, but learners drop out frequently. Learners' concerns (e.g. the topics in course content or logistics) and cognitive engagement patterns (e.g. "tentative" or "certain") are considered the essential factors affecting learners' course…

The intent of this research project was to address a perceived lack of capacity to address controversial topics or differences of perspective with civil discourse when engaged in learning in an online graduate course. Using carefully designed discussion prompts, students were asked to post, respond and reflect on their own research projects and…

This qualitative case study sought to explore the social construction of knowledge in the Change My View (CMV) subreddit online community. Few of the prior studies of discussion in online courses found evidence of the higher Phases of knowledge construction (up to four and five of the IAM framework), and it was hoped that the CMV environment would…

Conversation circles in kindergartens can foster discursive abilities such as argumentation. This paper analyzes argumentation in conversation circles in a kindergarten with respect to the function of narrative argumentation. We focus on second stories as a specific narrative form that is characterized by relating in content and form to a before…

Recent reforms in science education have supported the inclusion of engineering and their practices in K-12 curricula. To this end, many classrooms have incorporated engineering units that include design challenges. Design is an integral part of engineering and can help students think in creative and interdisciplinary ways. In this study, we…

This three-paper dissertation uses social network analysis to examine the literacy development and small group discourse of multilingual students in Grades 4 and 5. The data come from a randomized-controlled trial testing the effectiveness of homogeneous and heterogeneous small groups for English learners. The first paper tests whether two types…

Contrary to prevailing research on willingness to communicate (WTC) which treats spoken second language (L2) as the predominant indicator of WTC, this study examines a young English as a second language (ESL) learner's WTC expressed through multimodal means and her utilization of multimodal and multilingual resources for mediating WTC in…

In this study, we analyse a 9-year-old child's argumentative participation in a group discussion, from a microgenetic development angle. Specifically, we follow one child through the discussion and analyse the development process, defined as changed participation and as interactionally contingent upon the other participants and the teacher. The…

By applying two-mode social networks and Chinese word segmentation technologies, a novel visualization tool, the instant semantic analysis and feedback system (ISAFS), is designed in this study to present the semantic networks of co-words and non-co-words used in learners' discussion processes and assist learners in grasping the discussion…

Increasing student engagement with the social practices of science (i.e., communication, collaboration, and critique) is a goal throughout K-16 science education and provides an opportunity for science educators to leverage student discourse to optimize learning. Yet how instructors can encourage forms of discourse which predict increased…