The achievement gap has been the focus of a good deal of research, attention, and hopeful new practices, yet it has hardly decreased. Using insights from sociolinguistic and sociocultural studies of classrooms in concert with practices developed by teacher researchers in the tradition of the Brookline Teacher Researcher Seminar, the author…

This study seeks to analyze book group discussions on translated fiction in terms of micro public spheres. The paper explores the potentials of this perspective based on ethnographic data collected through participant observation with reading groups located across Britain. The discussion demonstrates the public sphere in operation beyond the…

Practitioners in the field of pharmacy are often confronted with ill-structured problems. Specifically, pharmacists are tasked with making patient-specific recommendations that are both safe and effective, which requires combining knowledge from the biomedical, behavioral, and pharmaceutical sciences. Given the dynamic nature of pharmacy as a…

This study provides in depth understanding of the occurrence of team learning activities and social--emotional reactions within team meetings and their relationships by observing team meetings. In addition, the teams' assessment regarding both their teamwork and emotions they experienced during their teamwork were investigated by conducting team…

This study explored how research-based physics tutorials help students use argumentation in a small group-work activity. The participants were four first-year non-major physics students taking algebra-based introductory physics course in an urban university in the southeastern region of United States (US). The content analysis was conducted to…

Supporting collaborative discourse with discussion forums in a typical Learning Management System (LMS) remains challenging. This article reports on a design case of an "unLMS" approach, which aimed to devise a networked learning environment not based on an LMS for collaborative discourse in an online course. To support such discourse,…

Student-generated tagclouds provided an intuitive overview of a group of learners' collective knowledge. Although such tagclouds may have the potential to be used as effective learning tools, it has not been clear how students use this tool for knowledge construction. In this paper, we report a two-stage study that investigated college students'…

Group work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses is an effective means of improving student outcomes, and many different factors can influence the dynamics of student discussions and, ultimately, the success of collaboration. The substance and dynamics of group discussions are commonly examined using qualitative methods such…

This study employed interviews and document analysis to achieve a better understanding of the design and facilitation strategies used by online instructors in a department of educational technology at a large university in the U.S. Some distinctions were found with the literature about what strategies and activities can be used in online…

Critical thinking (CT) is being recognized as an essential skill for students to master in the 21st century. Previous studies have suggested that teaching CT through asynchronous online discussions (AODs) can be one of the effective ways to equip students with such 21st skill in the educational settings. The purpose of this article is to review of…

A considerable body of research shows that individuals who demonstrate a wide variety of metacognitive skills perform better on scientific problem solving. We developed a way of implementing homework in an undergraduate physics course to promote metacognitive skills. This novel homework design includes both an individual and a team phase and was…

Group discussions are often used to improve students' participation in the learning process. Unfortunately, the most frequent problem is teacher difficulty assessing the contribution of each group member. This research aimed to explore student performance in group discussion through two types of peer assessment. Data were collected through…

Social constructivist principles and ideas are among those most cited in both educational and psychological circles today, and many current scholars and reformers ground their work in social constructivist theories. Yet the basic principles of social constructivism are notoriously difficult for students to understand and grapple with. This article…

Global value networks are often large, complex, and opaque. Understanding the relationships among stakeholders involved in these networks or organizations can be challenging. This card sort task provides an interactive way to engage participants in questioning the roles of stakeholders who are involved in a business ethics dilemma or an…

The impacts of a technology-integrated formative assessment technique on students' conceptual and procedural knowledge in studying chemical equilibrium are studied in this study. To attain the purpose, a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest strategy nested with a qualitative study method was adopted. The study has three groups: two experimental and…