Community-based courses, driven by connectivist learning theory, provide learners with a social environment that supports collaborative problem solving (CPS). The purpose of this study is to investigate the characteristics of potential collaborators before they engage in CPS. This study analyzed a community-based course, a cMOOC with a total of…

This study aimed to examine the behaviour of learners across a whole system and in various courses to reveal the interrelation between learners' system interaction, age, programme features and course design. We obtained data from the system logs of 1,634 learners enrolled in distance learning programmes. We performed hierarchical clustering…

The present study will shed light on peer interaction and children's positioning in preschool. Theoretically, the study takes its point of departure from the concept of interpretive reproduction, which stresses the importance of children's collective actions and participation in cultural production and reproduction. Positioning refers to how…

Inequity is a pressing concern in the mathematics education community. Recent research shows how inequity in everyday classroom interaction can shape student participation in subtle ways. This paper focuses on a tool, EQUIP, which uses a quantitative approach to illuminate aspects of such inequities. EQUIP cross-tabulates relatively low-inference…

This study presents findings from analyses of naturally occurring literacy events, where children jointly focus on reading and writing letters of the alphabet, illustrating social constructions of learning created through language and embodied action. Video recorded data from two different families living in an urban low-income area in Tanzania is…

In this article a study is presented of selective affiliation of two- and three-year-old children in the natural situation of Dutch daycare centers. Data of (behavioral) characteristics of 674 pairs of children (dyads) were collected. Multi-level analyses of these dyadic data were conducted and showed that the chance of friendship between two…

An in-depth interview format was used to explore gender and age differences in friendship patterns. Groups described friendship in superficially similar ways. However, in the taped interviews, large gender differences appeared that followed conceptually along instrumental/expressive dimensions. Age differences also appeared. (Author/ABB)

Sixteen children with developmental disabilities and 32 nondisabled children (all between 1.5 and 4.5 years of age) were placed in either a same- or mixed-age grouping of 6 children. Observation six months later showed that children in mixed-age groups took more conversational turns with partners with disabilities than did children in same-age…

Low-inference classroom observational data were collected on 362 children in four elementary schools (grades two to five) who had been consistentlV ranked by two successive teachers over a two-year period. Teachers ranked students on one or more of thirteen bipolar scales assessing personality characteristics and teacher expectations. Two-way…

This study recorded the pretend play behavior of a total of 22 boys and girls aged 20 and 26 months to determine the effects of age, sex, toy type, and order of toy presentation on the amount of pretending observed during two home visits. Each visit consisted of three segments: two play episodes of 10 minutes each and an intervening segment of…

Adult assistance procedures were experimentally compared for their effects upon the preschool child's tendency to persist in self-selected manipulative tasks in a free-play setting. (JMB)

This study examined the impact of preschoolers' knowledge of routine events, or scripts, on their conversational performance during dyadic pretend play with different discourse partners. The study was intended to investigate the success of preschoolers' communication with dyad members in matched and unmatched conditions, and to examine the ways in…

This study of mother-infant pairs investigates sex differences and age differences (infants of 6, 9, and 12 months of age) in mother and infant initiations of interactions and responses to the other's initiations. (SS)

Results showed that first-grade children were less likely to follow a task-based fair-play rule than were third graders when one of the other children was larger and older. When dealing with same-size age-mates, however, first graders were no less likely to follow a task-based rule than were third graders. (Author/CM)

This study investigated the pretend play behavior of 16 boys and girls aged 12 and 18 months. Each child was presented a standard set of stimulus materials during two home visits. For each of three 10-minute episodes, the child's pretend activities were recorded by means of a coded observation schedule. During episode 1 the child played alone,…