Many important real-world decision-making problems involve group interactions among individuals with purely informational interactions. Such situations arise for example in jury deliberations, expert committees, medical diagnoses, etc. We model the purely informational interactions of group members, where they receive private information and act…

Researchers of after-school tutoring primarily focus on educational outcomes with little attention to the social dynamics of such programs. In our qualitative case study, we examined the nature of interactions among tutors in a tutoring program at a homeless shelter for families. Employing Bourdieu's concepts of "social capital" and…

This paper reports on a small-scale study of the social interactions between six children labelled with special educational needs and their peers in their respective early years settings. Data from play observations, photographs and staff interviews is used to examine the dynamics of the connections that they make with other children. The position…

Purpose: The aim of the paper is to analyse the use of Communities of Practice and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to enhance knowledge sharing between researchers and advisors. The associated research question is to what extent ICT supported a virtual Community of Practice and has been effective in counteracting fragmentation…

How teachers position themselves and their students can influence the development of afforded or constrained local moral orders in ability-based teacher-led mathematics lessons. Local moral orders are the negotiated discursive practices and interactions of participants in the group. In this article, the developing local moral orders of 12 teachers…

A synchronous blend of online learning and "face-to-face" teaching is becoming a feasible instructional approach in higher education with the advent of technology. Although this learning mode is not new in higher education, little research has been done to contextualise social presence experiences in which effects of interactions were…

Science education research has recommended cooperative inquiry based science in the primary science context for more than two decades but after more than 20 years, student achievement in science has not substantially improved. This study, through direct observation and analysis, investigated content-related student interactions in an authentic…

This article troubles the established discourse of free choice and free play in early childhood education, and develops post-structural approaches to theorising children's agency in the context of institutional and relational power structures. It is widely accepted that planning a curriculum based on children's needs, interests and patterns of…

Consultation is a key means of service delivery in many psychological services. However, the "process" of consultation is little explored in Educational Psychology literature, particularly in the United Kingdom (UK). This paper focuses on a small-scale qualitative research study of psychological consultation provided by educational…

Studies of primary education within the UK have shown that small groups can feature within classrooms; however, equivalent research within secondary education remains scarce. Research has established effective group work approaches, yet secondary teachers may encounter difficulties employing approaches tied to parameters embedded within primary…

This paper presents the results of a micro-genetic analysis of the development of a creative solution arrived at by students working collaboratively to solve a robotics problem in a sixth grade science classroom. Results indicate that four aspects of the enacted curriculum proved important to developing the creative solution, including the…

Background: Hospital adoption of health information technology (HIT) systems is promoted as essential to decreasing medical error and their associated 44,000 annual deaths and $17 billion in healthcare costs (Institute of Medicine, 2001; Kohn, Corrigan, & Donaldson, 1999). Leading national healthcare groups, such as the Institute of Medicine,…

This article explores the construction of parent-teacher conferences in the Swedish preschool and focuses on processes that construct and maintain these meetings. The analysis draws upon an ethnographic study in two preschools and the empirical material consists of 11 audiotaped parent-teacher conferences and observations of everyday activities…

The Levels of Verbal Intimacy Technique (LOVIT) is an instrument for the analysis of verbal statements along a continuum from most intimate to least intimate. It enables an observer to place all verbal statements in one of 10 categories along this intimacy continuum. The technique has been used in research. (Author)

There is a large number of relationships between organisms in communities, and these relationships comprise the following types: predation and parasitism, commensalism, protocooperation and mutualism, neutralism, amensalism, and competition. The possible effects of the relationship between two species are that one or the other can benefit (+),…