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…

This study aimed to examine the role and process of reflective assessment supported by the Knowledge Connections Analyzer in helping low academic achievers to develop epistemic agency in knowledge building. The participants were 33 ninth-grade low achievers from a visual arts course in Hong Kong. A comparison class of 33 students, taught by the…

Digital conversation spaces have the potential to generate powerful collective intelligence, but only when users are thoughtful, reflective, and have experience interacting with diverse ideas. To be able to engage in online conversational spaces in this way, though, is not inherent or natural: it must be practiced. This article will argue that it…

This study examined the effects of the Local Systemic Change Through Teacher Enhancement Initiative (LSC) on 1,596 in-service high school mathematics teachers' knowledge. Because data are clustered by schools, a hierarchical linear model was calculated. It was found that five of the characteristics of the professional development, time to reflect,…

Purpose: The goal to stimulate perspective taking and inference making on social phenomena, such as gender roles in society, has proven to be difficult to achieve in general and in particular for primary school students. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to develop creative models and concepts for learning that provide guidance addressing these…

According to our experience, facilitating online reflective writing via Facebook motivates students to improve their writing skills and reflective thinking. Six students and a teacher from an urban school in the northern region of Malaysia were involved in this study. The qualitative data in the form of online archives were categorized as…

This article describes three reasons Twitter has become an essential part of US National Teacher of the Year Rebecca Mieliwocki's teaching life: (1) It provides professional development on demand by offering a steady stream of great new ideas, activities, lesson suggestions, book recommendations, and teaching tips that can be immediately…

The concepts of reflection and reflective practice have become the core of many teacher education programmes, with critical reflection as the goal for many teacher educators. This study examined the use of a videoconference discussion in an instructional methodology course as a means to enrich the process of reflection and encourage critical…

Classroom teachers sometimes struggle trying to find time during the typical school day to provide the writing instruction students need to be successful. This study examined 29 fifth through twelfth grade classroom teachers' survey responses about their perception of the effectiveness of using an online blogging tool, Kidblog, to plan and provide…

This study aims to evaluate a professional development programme that prepares and assists teachers with the implementation of a multidisciplinary science module, basing the evaluation on "participants' reactions," the first level of Guskey's five-level model for evaluation (2002). Positive evaluations at the higher levels in Guskey's…

In the digital age, numerous technological tools are available to enhance educational practices. When used effectively, student engagement and mobile learning are significantly increased. "Social Media in Education: Breakthroughs in Research and Practice" contains a compendium of the latest academic material on the usage, strategies, and…

This article explores how digital storytelling offers the potential to support transformative global citizenship education (TGCE) through a case study of the Bridges to Understanding program that connected middle and high school students globally using digital storytelling. Drawing on a TGCE framework, this research project probed the curriculum…

This paper explores how wiki may be used to support secondary education students' collaborative creativity processes and how such interaction can promote critical and creativity thinking. A science case-based project in which 81 secondary students participated was designed, implemented and evaluated. Students worked in the science wiki project…

The rise of English as an international language (EIL) has brought to light the needs of those who speak it as an additional language. This has in turn radically reshaped the role of culture in the EIL classroom, which may now aim at developing critical transcultural awareness. By reporting on a joint initiative undertaken by three schools in two…

In recent research, little attention has been paid to issues of methodology and analysis methods to evaluate the quality of the collaborative learning community. To address such issues, an attempt is made to adopt the Activity System Model as an analytical framework to examine the relationship between computer supported collaborative learning…