The current study examined the effects of different types of instructor comments on student engagement in an online discussion. In particular, this study examined three comment types: (1) praise-oriented comments, agreeing with students' initial messages and recapping their ideas, (2) elaboration-encouraging comments, requesting elaboration on the…

Learning to read and write starts at a very young age. It is expected that by the time students enter high school, they have developed certain reading and writing skills. However, research has proven many students still struggle with reading and writing skills in high school. Some of these students graduate high school ill-prepared to enter…

All too often, race discourse in the United States devolves into shouting matches, silence, or violence, all of which are mirrored in today's classrooms. This book will help individuals develop the skills needed to facilitate difficult dialogues across race in high school and college classrooms, in teacher professional learning communities, and…

Online discussions offer exciting potential for educational dialogue, but too often result in disjointed conversations with low levels of interactivity. One contributing cause is the traditional text-based interface, which presents posts in a long list, leaving students overwhelmed and without useful navigational cues. To address this problem, we…

Current views of literacy have expanded to encompass how individuals in sociocultural systems make meaning as they "read" and "write" their world. From this view, the work of students involved in pursuing deeper understandings as they discuss course concepts is a literacy act. This study focused on the inquiry and questioning…

In our ostensibly secular age, discussing the real-world contexts and impacts of religious traditions in the classroom can be difficult. Religious traditions may appear at different times to different students as too irrelevant, too personal, or too inflammatory to allow them to engage openly with the materials, the issues, and each other. In this…

Students within this study followed the ICSDR (Identify, Conceptualize/Connect, Storyboard, Develop, Review/Reflect/Revise) development model to create digital video, as a personalized and active learning assignment. The participants, graduate students in education, indicated that following the ICSDR framework for student-authored video guided…

Asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools, such as asynchronous online discussions (AODs), are widely used in higher education. The organization of AODs is of pedagogical importance, particularly for online-only classes, as these discussions are one of the major opportunities for participants to develop understanding of course…

Instructors often implement technology-based active learning pedagogies, such as clickers, to maximise student engagement and facilitate learning outcomes. Despite the abundance of clicker research, no work has directly compared student performance as well as student perceptions of clickers to a distinct, non-technological active learning…

College students' autonomous learning (AL) is becoming more important in the information era. The flipped classroom model is gaining great attention, for it is viewed as one of the most effective teaching strategies for accelerating students' AL. Undoubtedly, educators play a significant role in this process. Using a sociocultural lens, this…

Learning by invention is an alternative approach to teaching statistics where students are tasked with attempting to solve a problem before being taught the canonical formula for solving it, often resulting in increased understanding of material compared with traditional instruction. The first study, conducted in a college statistics classroom…

Since the birth of clickers at Pennsylvania State University, there have been numerous arguments on its effectiveness. This study, aiming to review use of clickers in education, examined literature over around a decade on use of clickers, involving benefits and defects of use of clickers, peer discussion, use of clickers in learning, teaching and…

This study compares the traditional use of case studies against the novel use of discussion boards to teach naive students in the United Arab Emirates about anxiety disorders. Sixty-six female students from an abnormal psychology class were randomly assigned to either the case study condition (CSC) or the discussion board condition (DBC). Students…

The depth of learning resides in collaborative work with more engagement and fun. Technology can enhance collaboration with a higher level of convenience and cloud computing can facilitate this in a cost effective and scalable manner. However, to deploy a successful online learning environment, elementary components of learning pedagogy must be…

Decision-problem structuring is conceptualized to be a process comprising activities characterized by the students. The activities are cognitive efforts of a group coming to an understanding and determining the representation of the decision-problem and of what knowledge is relevant to the decision-problem. Cognitive effort refers to the fraction…