Problem solving in groups can be rich with tension for students. This tension may arise from conflicting approaches (conceptual and/or epistemological) and/or from conflict emerging in the social relations among group members. Drawing on video records of undergraduate students working collaboratively, we use three cases to illustrate the…

There is considerable long-term interest in understanding the dynamics of collaboration networks, and how these networks form and evolve over time. Most of the work done on the dynamics of social networks focuses on well-established communities. Work examining emerging social networks is rarer, simply because data are difficult to obtain in real…

Following Ellis's (2005) call for more social and process-oriented planning research, this study explores how learners approach collaborative planning tasks in the classroom as a locally contingent activity in situ. Drawing on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, the present study focuses on a group planning stage that precedes the final…

For a number of years, higher education has moved away from didactic teaching toward collaborative and self-directed learning. This paper discusses how the configuration and spatial geometry of learning spaces influences engagement and interaction, with a particular focus on hierarchies between people within the space. Layouts, presented as…

Multi-touch technology is increasingly being used to support collaborative learning activities. However, to know how this technology can be used most effectively, we need to understand if collaborative interactions differ when groups are using multi-touch technology compared with other tools. In this paper, we compare the interactions of groups of…

Current empirical research on youth bullying rarely asks students to describe their violent encounters. This practice conflates incidents of aggression that may actually have different forms and features. In this article I provide the results of a qualitative analysis of retrospective interviews with high school youth about their experiences of…

The depth of learning resides in collaborative work with more engagement and fun. Technology can enhance collaboration with a higher level of convenience and cloud computing can facilitate this in a cost effective and scalable manner. However, to deploy a successful online learning environment, elementary components of learning pedagogy must be…

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…

The rise of online course enrollments in higher education has highlighted the need to establish and validate effective online instructional strategies focused on improving learning outcomes and affective responses towards instruction. One such strategy, group-based context personalization, frames instructional materials within contexts relevant to…

Project-based learning (PBL) instructional methods attempt to make connections between students and their ability to solve real problems. We framed our qualitative study within sociocultural theory and used the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) model to define the positive and negative factors occurring during a PBL…

This classroom action research aims to investigate the development of collaborative problem-solving competencies using STEM-based learning through dietary plan lessons. The participants included 77 twelfth-grade students in the 2018 academic year in the science-technology program in a public school under the supervision of the Ministry of…

This paper describes a research study that investigated foreign language students' collaborative practice in a blended, authentic learning environment. A group of intermediate and advanced level students of Italian at an Australian university interacted and collaborated with each other and with a group of native speaker mentors through a web-based…

Learning in computer-mediated setting represents a complex, multidimensional process. This complexity calls for a comprehensive analytical approach that would allow for understanding of various dimensions of learner generated discourse and the structure of the underlying social interactions. Current research, however, primarily focuses on manual…

Investigating the use of case studies as a teaching strategy to enhance the critical thinking skills of the students is the basic objective of this study. By discovering content and procedural issues, best practices are investigated and ways are discovered to foster critical thinking, as a result of which the students tend to develop the ability…

This qualitative study examines how youth of Color with and without disabilities used youth participatory action research (YPAR) to advance a youth-centered conceptualization of inclusive education (IE). We examined data over the course of an academic year, which included weekly video recordings of whole-group and small-group interactions in the…