This study examined students' understanding of, and reflective inquiry into discourse, specifically their epistemic discourse understanding and meta-discourse, and investigated their roles and relationships in fostering productive inquiry in knowledge building. The participants comprised two classes of ninth grade visual arts students inquiring…

Despite national curricula and instructional reforms calling for collaborative problem-solving skills (CPS), however, there is an absence of a theory-laden model showing how to effectively construct CPS for science learning. We therefore developed and validated a simulation-based CPS model that exploits its constructs, sequences, and causal…

As digital technologies proliferate throughout classrooms in the United States, iPads and other mobile tablets have been heralded as tools for enhanced peer collaboration. However, little research has examined exactly how students interact with and around iPads during collaborative learning tasks. This study employs multimodal interaction analysis…

In modern school education, the integration of technology has revolutionized traditional teaching methods and introduced innovative approaches to curriculum design. Class blogs and student blogs have emerged as dynamic web 2.0 tools that hold immense potential to transform the learning experience in schools. This abstract explores the utilization…

This study examined the types of learning behaviors students demonstrated while performing inquiry tasks. It also explored the relationship between the learning behaviors and students' domain knowledge. We observed fourteen students in five groups during a ninth-grade biology course. Three types of learning behaviors (inquiry, collaborative, and…

Networked learning provides opportunities for learners to develop their critical thinking, an important 21st century competency, through dialogue with fellow learners to consider other perspectives and negotiate and critique ideas and arguments. However, much extant literature has not examined networked learning environments among younger learners…

This study investigates how previous exposure to a foreign language and culture influences student performance in online knowledge-building tasks. As knowledge-building tasks allow students to share and distribute their knowledge; this study examines whether foreign language and culture knowledge is also distributed amongst the group. The study…

This study investigated the effectiveness of using Google Docs in collaborative concept mapping (CCM) by comparing it with a paper-and-pencil approach. A quasi-experimental study was conducted in a physics course. The control group drew concept maps using the paper-and-pencil method and face-to-face discussion, whereas the experimental group…

This research discusses the use of Twitter as a teaching-supporting tool in face to face (F2F) learning. The uniqueness and importance of this research is in the age group on which it focuses, an age group that has not yet been examined (ninth grade); furthermore, data was analyzed by decoding tweets, grouping tweets into various pedagogical and…

Learning science requires the understanding of concepts and formal relationships, processes that--in themselves--have been proved to be difficult for students as they seem to encounter substantial problems with most of the inquiry-learning processes in which they engage. Models in inquiry-based learning have been considered as powerful…

This article describes the Tribal Paradise Project the author and her colleagues designed for their high school students. This project was a bold attempt to bring together the real-world skills of collaboration and online writing into one major, cross-school project. Adapted from the famous "Flimibuff" assignment cited by Ray Saitz on his teacher…

We describe the design of a knowledge-building environment and examine the role of knowledge-building portfolios in characterizing and scaffolding collaborative inquiry. Our goal is to examine collaborative knowledge building in the context of exploring the alignment of learning, collaboration, and assessment in computer forums. The key design…

In this paper, we suggest that case-based resources, which are used for assisting cognition during problem solving, can be structured around the work of narratives in social cultural psychology. Theories and other research methods have proposed structures within narratives and stories which may be useful to the design of case-based resources.…