Collaboration is an increasingly popular topic in mathematics education due to its potential to foster students' learning. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to the semantic philosophical theory of inferentialism and its value for investigating students' collaboration. We suggest that Brandom's inferentialism can serve as a valuable…

This study investigated how word and child characteristics affect children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words. Participants were fourth- and fifth-graders representing native English speakers (NE) and bilingual learners with fluent English proficiency (FEP) and designated English Learners (EL). Students were taught the meanings of a…

There is no education without content. Teaching and learning in schools is devoted to "something," not to "nothing" or "anything." The more heterogeneous, multicultural, and multilingual the classroom, the more semantization of educational content within teaching and learning is needed. Therefore, the role of various…

In this study, we investigated if children build a print-to-meaning connection via the semantic radical -- a mechanism we call "semantic decoding" -- and its interaction with phonological decoding in orthographic learning of Chinese compound characters. Ninety-two Grade 4 children were taught the pronunciations and meanings of 16…

The purpose of this study is to share the design, implementation, and evaluation processes regarding an activity implemented for improving the vocabulary of 4th grade students, and to determine the opinions of the students about the activity. The activity serves to the purpose of learning the new words and phrases meaningfully through active…

This study investigated whether elementary students could collectively advance a knowledge-building discourse through judgments of promisingness and epistemic reflection. Supported by the Promising Idea Tool and its accompanying pedagogical design, 32 grade six students were involved in judging the promisingness of their community ideas, refining…

This study examines, within the domain of science, the characteristics of words that predict word knowledge and word learning. The authors identified a set of word characteristics--length, part of speech, polysemy, frequency, morphological frequency, domain specificity, and concreteness--that, based on earlier research, were prime candidates to…