With the advent of Common Core-based assessments, and resulting concerns about academic achievement, more and more students may require the level of instructional intensity tutoring affords. The extent of knowledge regarding the discourse that occurs within the tutoring context is, however, limited. As a result, it is difficult to envision and…

As a pedagogical approach that aims to develop students' group-working skills and to challenge their current knowledge, problem-based learning (PBL) provides a unique setting in which to examine disagreements in interaction. Previous research on disagreements in classrooms has typically examined tutor-student interaction or student-student…

Research has shown that educators may be reluctant to implement group work in their teaching due to concerns about students partaking in off-task behaviours. However, such off-task interactions have been shown to promote motivation, trust, and rapport-building. This paper details a study in which student groups were video recorded as they engaged…

In 2 separate studies, we found that college-age students learned more when they collaboratively watched tutorial dialogue-videos than lecture-style monologue-videos. In fact, they can learn as well as the tutees in the dialogue-videos. These results replicate similar findings in the literature showing the advantage of dialogue-videos even when…

This article is a narrative report of the findings from the analysis of multicultural facilitators' discourses on their e-readiness in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) affordances in open and distance learning (ODL) mediation experiences. First, the findings revealed by qualitative deconstructive discourse analysis…

We report on a study of preservice teachers who tutored adults learning English in a free evening class while simultaneously taking a course titled Community Literacy. Exploring their participation, we wondered in what ways pedagogy developed within this context. Drawing on a close discourse analysis of preservice teachers' written work, we found…

Although students' talk in problem-based learning (PBL) tutorials is the pivotal learning site in PBL, few studies have involved conducting a discourse analysis of this talk. This paper focuses on what we can learn about the PBL process from listening to how PBL students talked about it in naturally occurring talk in tutorials. The illuminative…

Case-based learning formats, in which relevant case information is provided just in time, require teachers to combine their scaffolding role with an information-providing one. The objective of this study is to establish how this combination of roles affects teacher behavior and that, in turn, mediates students' reasoning and problem solving. Data…

The "Community of Inquiry" (COI) theoretical framework suggests that successful higher education experiences are supported by the presence and interaction of cognitive, social and teaching elements. Since the COI model has been widely used for examining quality of asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) educational interactions, its…

One advantage of writing center tutorial groups over individual tutoring is that in groups students have the opportunity to become readers of others' writing and to provide feedback to their peers. In such groups, it is assumed that the tutor as facilitator serves as an interactional and linguistic model for students. To test this hypothesis, over…

As part of continual efforts towards improving learning and teaching in the faculty, lecturers in the law faculty of the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol debated the question of students' attendance and quality of tutorials in a recent email discussion amongst themselves. At the end of the debate the need for further research on…

A study investigated metadiscoursal signalling devices used in discussions in a business administration course in a British university, focusing on the use and function of the devices in seminars and tutorials. Data were drawn from seminar and discussion classes recorded for distance education purposes. The corpus of about 30,000 words included 18…