Access to age-appropriate literature is often difficult for students with significant disabilities without sufficient support. The picture plus discussion (PPD) intervention is an emerging research-based strategy used to increase comprehension of age-appropriate unadapted texts read aloud. While peer supports have been successfully used to…

Purpose: This commentary aims to echo Wilkinson, Bailey, and Maher's (this volume) arguments about the affordances of videos and video databases in studying learning and teaching. Design/Approach/Methods: This article illustrates a multivocal approach to the videos from the "Video Mosaic Collaborative" (VMC). In particular, three…

Despite the growth in online learning offerings in K-12 and higher education, limited research has been undertaken to better understand less visible online learning activities. Reading and rereading are not typically valued as important indicators of learning since the number or frequency of entries, words, or key phrases are usually visible and…

This article attends to the affective-political dimensions of doctoral aspiration. It considers why doctoral students continue to hope for an 'academic good life' in spite of the depressed and precarious features of the academic present. The article emerges from 2013 research with ten doctoral students in the Arts and Social Sciences, at a…

This study aimed to develop a rubric to assess participation of students in online discussion environments. For this purpose, the study included 168 students who participated in a course offered online during the spring semester of the 2015-2016 academic year. Developed based on the literature, the rubric consists of two parts (Form and Content,…

In this article, the authors report findings from a yearlong study that addressed teaching first-grade students to make inferences and engage in inferential discussion about children's literature. Because of the importance of both inferencing and discussion for comprehension, a collaborative team of two researchers and a classroom teacher focused…

There is growing interest in how to engage middle school students in science to improve their enthusiasm for science and to arrest the decline in uptake in the senior years. Also, there is interest in improving students' application of science to real-life situations, a requirement for international tests. One approach that offers hope for…

The inspection of mistakes can play a powerful role in an individual's learning process (Boaler 2015). The purpose of this article is to support the reader in selecting mistakes that can be leveraged to benefit the learning of all students. Specifically, the authors focus on "which" and "why": "which" mistakes to…

The benefits of in-class discussion, a form of active learning, are well-documented; in particular, discussions allow students the opportunity to learn from their peers. Yet students often treat discussions as 'down' or 'free' time. If students are not taking notes during discussion and reviewing those notes later on, they may not be learning much…

Recent research in English education has emphasised dialogically organised instruction to promote learning talk; yet little is known about teachers' perceptions of their efforts to teach dialogically. This study draws on video-cued interviews to examine how secondary preservice English teacher Emma experiences trying to teach dialogically and the…

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…

Discussions of power and privilege, oppression, and structural inequities in classrooms can produce complex understanding and critical analysis when facilitated effectively. In this article we present the critical conversations model for facilitating conversations that open up space for discussing such issues and encourage the development of…

In this study, we introduce new insights into prosodic analyses as an emerging method to study what happens in classrooms interactions. We claim that the prosodic aspects (features of speech such as intonation, volume and pace) of talk are important, but under-represented in the learning sciences. These prosodic aspects may be used to complement,…

In preparation for the academic rigor of higher-education institutions and the high standards of international businesses across the English-speaking globe, students must learn "to use language in more sophisticated ways: arguing, evaluating evidence, analyzing complex texts, and engaging in academic discussions." In order to give…

The article documents the process by which four independent high school students from the Francis W. Parker School in Chicago and the faculty adviser of their school newspaper, "The Weekly" (a monthly), produced a daylong journalism symposium designed to promote and explore democratic education, student leadership, and professional…