Analyses highlighting the epistemic dimension of students' participation in science have dominated science education literature for the past several years. While most of this literature has focused on how students learn together, the relational nature of these knowledge-building interactions has been under-examined. In response, this paper…

There is an ongoing need to support students' learning of linear functions, and the study of slope makes up a foundational component of this learning. We applied techniques from systemic functional linguistics to document the meanings that were established through spoken interaction between a student and her tutors during discussions of slope. We…

Classroom discussion is an essential pedagogy for teachers across grade levels and age groups. But what is a discussion, exactly? Are teachers really using discussion when they say they are? Recent research has examined this question and the results are unsettling. Martin Nystrand et al's (2001) massive study of classroom discourse (hereafter…

This article describes how students in an urban Catholic school draw on racial and religious categories to construct classroom-specific identities during coursework. When students engage with each other in classroom discussions, they use broadly circulating, institutional, and event-level categories to position one another, and in doing so…

Students have been reported to have stereotypical views of scientists as middle-aged white men in lab coats. We argue that a way to provide students with a more realistic view of scientists and their work is to provide them with the opportunity to interact with scientists during short, discussion-based sessions. For that reason, 20 scientists from…

The purpose of this study was to interpret students' participation in terms of social and argumentation norms to improve understanding of social interaction in scientific argumentation. Therefore, the study sought to identify social and argumentation norms formed in group argumentation and to explore changes in students' participation as lessons…

This study explores strategies students use to construct their academic engagement in the social environment of school. The study is based on group interview data collected from 161 sixth (78) and eighth (83) grade students. Students reflected both engaging and disengaging episodes. Data were content analysed. The results show that students…

Virtual environments are able to extend the space of interaction beyond the classroom. In order to analyze how distributed cognition functions in such an extended space, we suggest focusing on the architecture of intersubjectivity. The Euroland project--a virtual land created and populated by seven classrooms supported by a team of…

Online conversations help teachers engage in constructive criticism and attend more carefully to aligning lesson plans with problem solving. This article describes a strategy for using an online discussion board to help teachers evaluate one another's lesson plans. The online peer-review activity suggests that fostering critical pedagogical…