Research has shown that educators may be reluctant to implement group work in their teaching due to concerns about students partaking in off-task behaviours. However, such off-task interactions have been shown to promote motivation, trust, and rapport-building. This paper details a study in which student groups were video recorded as they engaged…

In 2 separate studies, we found that college-age students learned more when they collaboratively watched tutorial dialogue-videos than lecture-style monologue-videos. In fact, they can learn as well as the tutees in the dialogue-videos. These results replicate similar findings in the literature showing the advantage of dialogue-videos even when…

Although students' talk in problem-based learning (PBL) tutorials is the pivotal learning site in PBL, few studies have involved conducting a discourse analysis of this talk. This paper focuses on what we can learn about the PBL process from listening to how PBL students talked about it in naturally occurring talk in tutorials. The illuminative…

In the contemporary university the large classes associated with many core units mean that tutorials are often taken by many part-time sessional who are typically employed on a casual basis, paid an hourly rate and not paid to attend the lectures. Given this situation, unit coordinators are often responsible for another phase in curriculum…

This article explores the use of discourse analysis and conversation analysis as an evaluation tool in problem-based learning. The basic principles of the methods are discussed and their application in analysing talk in problem-based learning considered. Findings suggest that these methods could enable an understanding of how effective…

The "Community of Inquiry" (COI) theoretical framework suggests that successful higher education experiences are supported by the presence and interaction of cognitive, social and teaching elements. Since the COI model has been widely used for examining quality of asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) educational interactions, its…

An analysis was made of the strategies by which tutors adapt their teaching to individual students; the objective was to synthesize these strategies in a computer system called SCHOLAR. Tape recordings of dialogues between tutors and students about South American geography were made to discover the strategies used by tutors. Since SCHOLAR is a…