Changing practices in schools is a very complex endeavor. This paper is about new practices we prompted to foster collaboration and critical reasoning in science classrooms: the presentation of pictures representing different perspectives, small group synchronous argumentation, and moderation of synchronous argumentation. A CSCL tool helped in…

This study examined the effect of grouping teachers and students by conceptual level (CL) upon the teachers' information handling behavior. Twenty secondary school teachers were divided into two groups of 10 HCL and 10 LCL teachers according to their scores of the Paragraph Completion Test. Forty pairs of sixth graders were formed, each pair…

True learning requires that students "make meaning" for themselves, but the patterns of verbal behavior that prevail in secondary classrooms tend to stifle rather than facilitate this process. Excerpts from tape recordings of lessons in three secondary classrooms show that, whereas the teachers display great autonomy and control over what they…

This report is an early release of a measurement instrument used in a longitudinal project Management Implications of Team Teaching (MITT), and is taken from a larger, technical Project MITT report, "Governance and Task Interdependence in Schools: First Report of a Longitudinal Study." The instrument, "task interdependence,"…