The purpose of this study was to examine instructional strategies used to motivate students to engage in online communication courses. Eighteen undergraduate students, seven graduate students, and ten faculty members were interviewed individually or in small focus groups. Results indicate the significance of instructional strategies that promote…

The purpose of this study was to enhance our understanding of the relationship between collaborative talk and metacognitive talk during group mathematical problem-solving. Research suggests that collaborative talk may mediate the use of metacognitive talk, which in turn is associated with improved learning outcomes. However, our understanding of…

This article analyses the challenges teachers face when entering a digital and open online environment in higher education. Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become a popular phenomenon, making online learning more visible in the educational agenda; therefore, it is appropriate to analyse their expansion and diversification to help inform…

The present paper examines a patterning activity that was organised within a teaching experiment in order to analyse the different uses of variables by secondary school students. The activity presented in the paper can be categorised as a pictorial/geometric linear pattern. We adopted a student-oriented perspective for our analysis, in order to…

The importance of the research related to the existence of collaborative learning in higher education for Latinos, specifically pre-service teachers, has been substantiated. It has been defined that while teacher retention rates for Latinos are lower than for whites, using teamwork in the classroom might make Latinos teaching more rewarding. Most…

Collaborative learning is often used in higher education to help students develop their teamwork skills and acquire curricular knowledge. In this paper we test a mediation model in which the quality of group discussions mediates the impact of gender diversity and group motivation on collaborative learning effectiveness. Our results show that the…

This study investigated the effectiveness of visible-annotation types used in online discussions to enhance the accuracy of shared knowledge and the level of constructed knowledge in computer-supported collaborative learning environments. Three types of visible-annotation were developed specifically for this study, which had the function of…

The impact that Information and Communications Technologies have in the way today's young people communicate and interact is unquestionable. This impact also affects the educational field, which is required to respond to the needs of twenty first century students by training them in acquiring new skills and strategies to deal with a changing and…

Postgraduate taught provision in Anglophone higher education contexts is becoming increasingly populated by cohorts of students from a wide range of linguistic, cultural and educational backgrounds. However, the voices of these students on their learning experiences remain largely unheard. Little previous research exists on the experiences of…

This paper describes our research approach in which we have focused on situational and contextual variations in motivation and emotion regulation to better understand its role, appearance and function in collaborative learning situations. We have used research designs that employ process-oriented measures combined with subjective interpretations…

In this study, the researcher aimed to understand how students learned the targeted knowledge with an interactive response system (IRS) tool, and whether learners in two different learning modes: individual and group use of IRS, differed in their learning performance and knowledge retention after the IRS activity. These two kinds of IRS…

While there has been research on the effects of utilizing Peer Mentors within Learning Communities with regards to retention data, little research has been done to show the effects that Peer Mentoring has on learning outcomes within a Learning Community. Using anecdotal evidence from peer mentors working within a Learning Community at an urban…

The current experimental study examined the effects of graphic organizers in a collaborative learning context where students constructed knowledge during online discussions. As the results could vary depending on how students interacted with the graphic organizers, this study compared two different approaches: instructor-provided versus…

The aim of this study is to identify Vocabulary Learning Strategies (VLS) that seem to be used more frequently by Saudi undergraduate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students and to discuss the sub-strategies amongst the main five strategies identified by Schmitt's (1997) taxonomy of VLS. The population sample of 94 undergraduates was selected…

Introducing group work in college science classrooms can lead to noticeable gains in student achievement, reasoning ability, and motivation. To realize these gains, students must all contribute. Strategies like assigning roles, group contracts, anonymous peer evaluations, and peer ratings all encourage student participation. In a class using these…