The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of an intervention on pre-service science teachers' self-efficacy to teach science through argumentation and explore the challenges they experienced while implementing argumentation. Forty pre-service science teachers in their final semester of schooling participated in an intervention that…

The role of talk in developing understanding in science has been well documented and the recognition of this in the new National Curriculum for England is very positive. The curriculum outlines the need for quality and variety of language in order for children to develop their scientific vocabulary and to articulate scientific concepts clearly and…

We present our design for a cell biology course to integrate content with scientific practices, specifically data interpretation and model-based reasoning. A 2-year research project within this course allowed us to understand how students interpret authentic biological data in this setting. Through analysis of written work, we measured the extent…

Detailing is a linguistic tool for mathematical argumentation in which given mathematical information is operationalized through one's warrants to support a claim. Recent literature suggests that students' detailing is related to their early algebraization. This study examined 168 elementary students' use of detailing in two mathematical…

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an instructional design approach for promoting student learning, in context-rich settings. GlobalEd 2 (GE2) is PBL intervention that combines face-to-face and online environments into a 12-week simulation of international negotiations of science advisors on global water resource issues. The GE2 environment is…

This discourse analysis study examines the final moments of selected online sermons delivered by America's leading evangelical pastors and speakers, paying particular attention to the language employed in the presentation of Christian gospel tenets, the public invitation for salvation, the altar call that identifies new followers, and the…

This paper attempts to investigate five and six-year old children's ability to formulate logical reasoning. More specifically, our interest focuses on the investigation of young children's ability to use arguments based on logical reasoning. Can pre-school children build arguments based on logical reasoning such as deductive reasoning, or forms of…

Any child who has ever negotiated his or her bedtime, pleaded for items in the grocery store, or asked to attend a community event has practiced the art of persuasive argument. Why not bring that expertise into the classroom to introduce children to the fundamentals of persuasive writing? According to elementary educator Brandi Clark, picture…

Aim/Purpose: Quality in higher education assumes the challenge of developing in all citizens of the 21st century the cognitive, motivational, and socio-cultural dimensions that provide them with communication competences including the use of information and communication technologies, for the dissemination of sustainable scientific knowledge in…

The present study examined the complex structural relationships between the factors that influence L2 writing in more and less cognitively demanding tasks. To this end, 298 10th graders were recruited from a local high school in Korea. Participants completed tasks measuring L1 and L2 writing skills, L2 reading comprehension, L2 proficiency, L2…

Although participation in academic speaking events is a key to developing disciplinary understanding, students for whom English is a second language may have limited access to these learning events due to an increasingly dialogic and active higher education pedagogy which places considerable demands on their oracy skills. Drawing on the Oracy…

This qualitative study is an analysis of the interactional environment of opinion exchange, based on a corpus of seven informal conversations between native speakers of French recorded in 2010. While previous research has highlighted a predilection for diverging views in French conversation, the data here reveal considerable mitigation in the…

NCTM's "Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All" (2014), outlines eight teaching practices for effective teaching and learning mathematics. One of them, facilitate meaningful mathematical discourse, states, "Effective teaching of mathematics facilitates discourse among students to build shared understanding of…

This study explored the quality of arguments used by first-year engineering university students enrolled in a traditional physics course dealing with electromagnetic induction and related problem solving where they had to assess whether the electromagnetic induction phenomenon would occur. Their conclusions were analyzed for the relevance of the…

Sourcing is vital for knowledge construction from online information sources, yet learners may find it difficult to engage in effective sourcing. Sourcing can be particularly challenging when lay readers encounter conflicting expert accounts of controversial topics, a situation which is increasingly common when learning online. The aim of this…