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…

The goal of this study was to develop a classification for a range of discourse patterns that occur in text-based asynchronous discussion forums, and that can aid in the distinction of three modes of discourse: knowledge sharing, knowledge construction, and knowledge building. The dataset was taken from Knowledge Forum® databases in the Knowledge…

In this paper we examine how two groups of middle school students arrive at shared understandings of and solutions to mathematical problems. Our data consists of logs of student participation in the Virtual Math Teams (VMT) system as they work on math problems. The project supports interaction both through chat and through a virtual whiteboard. We…

This study explores the potential of networked handheld computers to support collaborative problem solving in small groups. Drawing on data from a middle school mathematics classroom equipped with a wireless handheld network, I argue that the sharing of mathematical objects through interactive devices broadens the "bandwidth" of classroom…