The present research represents a longitudinal investigation into Mobile Instant Messaging to develop second language skills. WhatsApp application was selected as the chat-based communication tool to carry out this study, which focuses on writing and speaking skills' development. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were used to tackle students…

Learning trajectories/progressions are an emerging research focus in mathematics education. A set of descriptors of early progress in mathematics was developed for students with complex needs. Developers leveraged off existing research-based frameworks and meta-analyses, as well as integrating findings from individual research studies in some…

In formal education, the teaching of natural sciences begins when children are about 12 years old. Teachers justify this with the difficulty and abstraction of concepts in these sciences, and they refer to the theory of child development by Piaget. However, numerous examples from everyday life, from non-formal education, analysis of the…

Learning Mathematics in Primary Schools is often mediated through the use of multiple representations. However, teachers may not pay enough attention to the way they use these representations. Given that the translations among representations may not always be smooth, it may be insightful to examine how teachers mediate learning through the use of…

We examine the ability of supervised text classification models to identify several discourse properties from teachers' speech with an eye for providing teachers with meaningful automated feedback about the quality of their classroom discourse. We collected audio recordings from 28 teachers from 10 schools in 164 authentic classroom sessions,…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of literature circles on the reading comprehension and attitudes toward reading of gifted students in an elementary school. Using a quasi-experimental design, this action research compared two groups of gifted fourth grade students in the reading programs. The experimental group included…

Automatic assessment of the quality of classroom discourse can have a transformative effect on research and practice on improving teaching effectiveness. We improve on a previous automated method to measure teacher authentic questions -- open-ended questions without pre-scripted responses that predict student achievement growth -- using classroom…

The significance of curriculum in building up language of mathematics which enables learners to construct and communicate knowledge of mathematics has not received due attention even as the pedagogical challenges faced by the students in learning mathematics have been discussed for years. Learning language of mathematics is not only valuable in…

This study explores a language learner's screen while interacting from a desktop videoconferencing device as part of an intercultural telecollaboration exchange that connected teacher-trainees and French learners. Communicative tasks involving opinion exchanges require from language learners simultaneous speaking and listening comprehension…

Reaching proficient levels of literacy is a universal goal for all children in the elementary classroom. This objective is especially challenging for English language learners particularly in the domain of writing. Writing has been identified as one of the most essential skills because the world has become so text-oriented. Due to this change,…

Aspects that influences mathematics learning is widely studied and language factors have been identified as a key backer to difficulties in learning Mathematics. It is evidenced that not only cognitive factors but also affective factors have vital role in learning mathematics. Such affective beliefs sources from various aspects of mathematics…

This mixed methods study extends findings from a prior study exploring use of increasingly-complex, expository text situated within a five-week interdisciplinary intervention in which first-grade children attending a Sheltered-English (SEI) immersion classroom advanced their conceptual knowledge and academic language approximating levels near or…

In this paper, we propose a visual saliency algorithm for automatically finding the topic transition points in an educational video. First, we propose a method for assigning a saliency score to each word extracted from an educational video. We design several mid-level features that are indicative of visual saliency. The optimal feature combination…

This study relates factors in nature of Mathematics and its teaching learning to student difficulties for diverse mathematics tasks. Descriptive survey was done on a sample of 300 high school students in Kerala with a questionnaire on difficulties in learning. Student perception of difficulty on 26 types of tasks, under five heads that students…

This paper describes students' developing meta-representational competence, drawn from the second phase of a longitudinal study, "Transforming Children's Mathematical and Scientific Development." A group of 21 highly able Grade 1 students was engaged in mathematics/science investigations as part of a data modelling program. A pedagogical…