Background: This study considers the moment-bymoment mathematics discourse of teachers and students and the relationship of these discourses to student learning. I focus on the discursive constructs of responsiveness to students' mathematical thinking and the intellectual work in teacher and student discourse. Responsiveness to students'…

A central challenge for science educators is to enable young people to act as scientists by gathering and assessing evidence, conducting experiments, and engaging in informed debate. We report the design of the nQuire toolkit, a system to support scripted personal inquiry learning, and a study of its use with school students ages 11-14. This…

The concept of "intrinsic motivation" lies at the heart of the user engagement created by digital games. Yet despite this, educational software has traditionally attempted to harness games as extrinsic motivation by using them as a sugar coating for learning content. This article tests the concept of "intrinsic integration" as…

Evaluating the impact of instructional innovations and coordinating instruction, assessment, and testing present complex tensions. Many evaluation and coordination efforts aim to address these tensions by using the coherence provided by modern cognitive science perspectives on domain-specific learning. This paper introduces an alternative…

This article reports a design experiment conducted over three successive school years, with the teacher's goal of having his Grade 4 students assume increasing levels of collective responsibility for advancing their knowledge of optics. Classroom practices conducive to sustained knowledge building were co-constructed by the teacher and students,…

We report on the initial attempts at evaluating "at scale" a particular technological/curricular innovation that enables more students to develop deeper knowledge. The methods, issues, and findings of the current pilot experiment speak not only to the success of SimCalc MathWorlds, the focus of our research program, but also to the…

The scaffolding metaphor was originally developed to describe the support given by a more expert individual in a one-on-one interaction. Since then, the notion of scaffolding has been applied more broadly, and it has been transformed and generalized. Most recently, it has been used by researchers in the learning sciences to describe features and…

Investigates whether science permeates the design environment and is thus contexted within the other activities of collaborative management and technology. Focuses on which contexts gave rise to science talk. Studies a classroom with (n=33) students divided into seven teams. (Contains 46 references.) (Author/YDS)

There has been much interest in using software tools to scaffold learners in complex tasks, that is, to provide supports that enable students to deal with more complex content and skill demands than they could otherwise handle. Many different approaches to scaffolding techniques have been presented in a broad range of software tools. I argue that…

In this article, I examine distributed scaffolding, an emerging approach in the design of supports for rich learning environments intended to help students develop disciplinary ways of knowing, doing, and communicating. Distributed scaffolding incorporates multiple forms of support that are provided through different means to address the complex…

Argues that a focus on building an authoring tool for a complete learning environment is misplaced. Analyzes the task of authoring a commercial educational system. Describes the Visual Translator, an authoring tool written specifically for this purpose. (Author/CCM)

Presents a prototype authoring tool for interactive educational software called Investigate and Decide Learning Environments (IDLE-Tool). Introduces IDLE-Tool as the task model around which the tool is based. A model of the authoring process called Guided Case Adaptation is offered as an approach to employing models and an exemplar to effectively…

"Learning by doing" in pursuit of real-world goals has received much attention from education researchers but has been unevenly supported by mathematics education software at the elementary level, particularly as it involves arithmetic word problems. In this article, we give examples of doing-oriented tools that might promote children's ability to…

The notion of scaffolding learners to help them succeed in solving problems otherwise too difficult for them is an important idea that has extended into the design of scaffolded software tools for learners. However, although there is a growing body of work on scaffolded tools, scaffold design, and the impact of scaffolding, the field has not yet…

Based on a collective case study of the use of an economics Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) tutorial-based package, WinEcon, in 3 British schools, this article examines the activity structures that exist in ICT-mediated lessons situated within their broader sociocultural contexts. Activity theory and its highly developed ideas of…