Cummins calls on educators to promote critical dialog during micro-interactions with students, times when students acquire knowledge and negotiate their identities. For critical dialog to flourish, educators must create caring environments. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether a discourse of caring was transmitted to ethnic Kurdish…

CSCL systems which follow the dual-interaction spaces paradigm support the synchronous construction and discussion of shared artifacts by distributed or colocated small groups of learners. The most recent generic dual-interaction space environments, either model based or component based, can be deeply customized by teachers for supporting…

This study examines the effect of guided reflection on team processes and performance, based on West's (1996, 2000) concept of reflexivity. Communicating via e-mail, 49 hierarchically structured teams (one commander and two specialists) performed seven 15 min shifts of a simulated team-based military air-surveillance task (TAST) in two meetings, a…

Interpersonal dynamics within friendships were observed in a sample of 120 (60 male, 60 female) ethnically diverse 16- and 17-year-old adolescents characterized as persistently antisocial, adolescent-onset, and normative. Dyadic mutuality and deviant talk were coded from videotaped friendship interactions. Persistently antisocial adolescents…

The merits of incorporating group work into learning environments are well established. Online classes and other distance learning settings, however, can make it challenging to introduce traditional group projects. Wikis use technology to facilitate group work in distance learning settings. Wikis allow individuals in different locations to…

In this case study, the researcher observed the social interactions within a Web 2.0 learning environment to examine the nature of the learner social presence. Social presence is essential to facilitate group cooperation and plays a central role in establishing learners' sense of belonging and social cohesion to the group. Social presence is…

Teacher collaboration and professional development are crucial components to any school improvement process. In an international school context differences among teachers emerging from culture, language, training, and environment can present a unique view of how teachers collaborate and learn together. The purpose of the study was to determine…

This article provides an empirically grounded analysis of how children and adults kinesthetically recontextualize standardized, official health messages into personally meaningful, context-specific health knowledge. The in-depth interview research uses grounded theory methodology to analyze transcripts and a sociology of childhood framework to…

From the vantages of a teacher who has been researched and an educational researcher who has researched teachers, this inquiry constructs a knitted narrative from journals, letters, and stories written about my time teaching English studies in a remote First Nations' community and articles written about me when I was a research participant in a…

One of the most useful ways to enhance collaboration is to create scenarios where learners are able to interact more effectively. Nevertheless, the design of pedagogically sound and well-thought-out collaborative learning scenarios is a complex issue. This is due to the context of group learning where the synergy among learners' interactions…

Much has been researched and written concerning the structure, attributes, and benefits of the professional learning community (PLC), yet many have found that this highly collaborative model is difficult to implement. One reason for this was that conflict among team members often limited communication and therefore halted collaboration. In an…

Communities of practice challenge the traditional notion of learning as receiving knowledge which is essentially disembodied from practice. A community of practice is grounded by two central tenets: essentially that learning is situated, and that practice is made meaningful through reflection with others who engage in the shared experience. In…

This paper reports a systematic literature review examining empirical studies on the effects of peer assessment for learning. Peer assessment is fundamentally a social process whose core activity is feedback given to and received from others, aimed at enhancing the performance of each individual group member and/or the group as a whole. This makes…

The under-representation of women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields is of continuing concern, as is the lack of women in senior positions and leadership roles. During a time of increasing demand for science and engineering enterprise, the lack of women and minorities in these academic disciplines needs to be addressed by…

Many mathematics classrooms use cooperative learning to support equitable learning environments for all students. Past research in the field has focused primarily on increasing achievement rather than on contexts that support equitable interactions. This year-long study in 3 secondary mathematics classes compares 2 activity structures--a group…