New challenges in education demand effective solutions. Although Learning Analytics (LA), Educational Data Mining (EDM) and the use of Big Data are often presented as a panacea, there is a lot of ground to be covered in order for the EDM to answer the real questions of educators. An important step toward this goal is to implement holistic…

There is a renewed scientific interest in the role of childhood in human evolution, pointing to the explorative phase of a human's life history that shapes how children learn and develop. This study presents a synthesis from evolutionary sciences that considers biases in childhood learning through activities in play, exploration, and social…

Building a more comprehensive understanding of gaming literacies, this article explores the kinds of literacy practices that emerge through participation and play within escape rooms. Based on a dataset of video recordings of participant interactions within an escape room, we perform side-by-side analyses of play based on two theoretical…

Field-based education is interactive, hands-on, and based on real world experience and methodology, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has faced special challenges. As many institutions may struggle to maintain this vital component of geographic education, this resource paper aims to illustrate the impacts of the pandemic and provide some…

Conflicts play an important role to improve group learning effectiveness; they can be decreased, increased, or ignored. Given the sequence of messages of a collaborative group, we are interested in recognizing conflicts (detecting whether a conflict exists or not). This is not an easy task because of different types of natural language…

In the twenty-first-century working professionals need to possess strong Interactional Competence to handle professional communication in intercultural contexts (PCIC). However, the relationship among the three PCIC constituents -- culture, workplace and interaction -- is undertheorized in current research. This leaves PCIC practitioners…

This article presents the use of conversation analysis (CA) in the context of sociocultural theory (SCT) driven research on L2 development, or CA-for-SCT. I focus specifically on the CA concept of action ascription as it applies to understanding the nature of mediation in interaction. I begin with an overview of the concept of action ascription…

The COVID-19 pandemic led to significant changes in higher education institutions, with a rapid pivot from on-campus to online teaching and learning. The move to predominantly online teaching resulted in a very different learning experience for many campus-based students, offering new opportunities and challenges. This Directions article is…

Blended learning, as an efficient teaching mode that combines the advantages of both online and offline learning, has been widely applied in universities. Nevertheless, the different learning patterns induce difficulty in evaluating the learning quality. In this paper, an approach of integrating online and offline interactions is proposed by…

Engaging in ethnographic sibling research, my brother and I intended to contribute to the knowledge of a multilingual learner's literacy practices via Zoom. We discuss agency and negotiated interaction between the ethnographer and sibling-participant. We examine data from field notes, interviews, and participant artifacts using a social semiotic…

This article explores the application of instructional design principles to enhance Extension e-learning programs. The growth of e-learning has led to its incorporation into many organizations, including extension programs, offering opportunities for expanded access to educational content. However, e-learning presents unique challenges, such as…

The use of social robots in education is a growing area of research and the potential future applications are various. However, the conversational models behind current social robots and chatbot systems often rely on rule-based and retrieval-based methods. This limits the social robot to predefined responses and topics, thus hindering it from…

This study investigates the efficiency of "segmented ludicization" in language learning, i.e., the method considering learners' cognitive processing in ludicized learning experiences. This method transforms traditional didactic environments into playable procedures involving intervals for learners' knowledge digestions and retrievals.…

Research regarding dysgraphia, an impairment in writing, is attaining more attention in recent times. The existing studies on dysgraphia draw insights from cognitive, behavioural, neurological, and genetic fields of knowledge. However, these multiple studies on dysgraphia fail to illustrate how these cognitive, behavioural, neurological, and…

Group work can engage students in active learning, yet students often resist working with peers in class. We investigated the impact of five minimally structured, easily implemented group work strategies used during weekly problem-based discussion sections in two introductory chemistry courses through student surveys and quiz score analyses.…