Moving from arithmetic to algebraic thinking at early grades is foundational in the study of number patterns and number relationships. This qualitative study investigates mental computational activity in a third grade classroom's and its relationship to algebraic thinking and reasoning. The data sources include classroom observations, field notes,…

Designing and evaluating teacher development programs for graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) who teach in the laboratory is a prominent feature of chemistry education research. However, few studies have investigated the impact of a GTA teacher development program on the verbal interactions between participating GTAs and students in the…

This paper focuses on the study of student teachers' verbal interaction in learning situations generated in a classroom corresponding to a mathematics methods course. In our work, we incorporate two "ways of seeing" a group: as an entity or as a set composed of individualities. We present an analytical framework that considers two dimensions…

This study considers in what ways sustained shared thinking between young children aged 5-6 years can be facilitated by working in dyads on a computer-based literacy task. The study considers 107 observational records of 44 children from 6 different schools, in Oxfordshire in the UK, collected over the course of a school year. The study raises…

This dissertation explores how participants express and interpret verbal cues of interaction involvement in dyadic conversations via text-based Instant Messaging (IM). Moreover, it seeks to discover differences in the way American participants and Chinese participants use verbal cues when they are highly, or lowly involved. Based on previous…

Verbal report protocols have been considered as direct representations of individual cognitive processes. The present study examined the social nature of verbal reports, particularly focusing on whether and in what ways concurrent think-aloud (TA) protocol data are recipient-designed. The results of this study suggest that verbal reports elicited…

Introduces computerized coding procedure that rates words and utterances in terms of emotion, cognition, and contract, as well as contingency method of analyzing verbal interactions. Rating procedure and contingency correlation analyses using transcripts of sessions conducted by three therapists with one client found that therapists' utterances…

Conversational analysis was used to evaluate conversation between an adult with autism and a researcher. Analysis identified differences in conversational style based on such features as topic movement, topic maintenance, repairs, interference from earlier structures, common collocations, overlaps, latching, and pauses. Findings suggest the…

Various communication studies have revealed the existence of a "preverbal" stage of communication consisting of centers within the brain that exists in an innate form or a form preprogrammed for future information acquired from the environment through experience (socialization). Such centers serve to prepare the individual for…

The study examined the communicative competence of 30 learning disabled and 30 non-learning disabled children (ages 9 to 13) in both referential and semistructured dyadic communication tasks. The use of both instructional strategies influenced the quality of subjects' verbal communicative interactions. (Author/DB)

In order to improve instruction in basic speech courses, a program was developed adapting creative problem solving to speech preparation and to interactive speech communication. The program, called O-I-C--Orientation, Incubation, and Composition--and based on Howell's five levels of competence and their implications, begins with a thorough study…

Sixty-one adolescents with learning disabilities received clear or unclear instructions from an adult before completing the Rorschach Arrangement Task and a test of abstract thinking. Adolescents receiving clear communication performed significantly better and used more efficient cognitive strategies than did adolescents in the unclear…

Three young adults with moderate to severe mental retardation were taught conversation skills using task analysis and cognitive strategies training procedures. Results show that the participants generalized the conversation skills learned under the cognitive strategies condition and that the cognitive strategies training allowed more normalized…

In this article, the author narrates how her son's communication skills have progressed through the use of photographic visuals. Her son, Ryan, was diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) when he was aged two years and seven months. At this time he was unresponsive to his name, had virtually no words and definitely no comprehension of…

The performance of 24 language-disordered children (ages 3-8) on an ambiguity detection task was compared to that of children matched for comprehension level and children matched for cognitive level. It is concluded that communicative factors, both active primary comprehension and social communicative knowledge, had a stronger influence than the…