In the fall of 2011, an undergraduate student who is also a military spouse and mother of school-aged children, shared with the College of Education (COE) at Kansas State University faculty her concerns about the necessity of intentional preparation of teachers and counselors regarding the unique needs of military-connected children. From that…

Recent research reveals that students' interest in school science begins to decline at an early age. As this lack of interest could result in fewer individuals qualified for scientific careers and a population unprepared to engage with scientific societal issues, it is imperative to investigate ways in which interest in school science can be…

This paper gives prominence to rural teachers' own accounts of gender in three co-educational primary schools in Lesotho. The paper employs the social constructionist paradigm as its theoretical framework. Drawing from ethnographic data (observations and informal discussions), it discusses factors that inform teachers' constructions of gender and…

Using cultural frameworks, and based on the author's personal experience and conversations with fellow Chinese and American graduate students, this essay analyzes the struggle for Chinese students who have to strike a balance between the American style of learning which is characterized by class discussion and the Chinese style of learning which…

Take a minute and imagine the ideal classroom learning environment. What would it be like? How would students learn? What would they be doing? Certainly, each student would be actively engaged in the lesson, exploring and discovering the key points. Perhaps students would work collaboratively, discussing various concepts and figuring out central…

Even though discourse-intensive mathematics instruction is a widely endorsed pedagogy for preservice elementary teachers, much still remains unknown about how this type of instruction affects student learning. This study investigated the relationship between talk moves that prompted preservice teachers to respond to each other's contributions…

As the proportion of children from culturally diverse backgrounds in the nation's schools increases, the teacher workforce is projected to remain overwhelmingly White, monolingual, and female. These differences are believed to have fostered a cultural mismatch, where teachers are challenged in their ability to meaningfully connect with their…

This paper presents a normative pragmatics analysis of students' use of science content in eight socioscientific group discussions about human gene therapy. The specific focus of the paper is on the argumentative role that invocations of science had in the dialectics of the discussions. The analysis suggests that science content occasionally…

This study examines other-initiated repair as what has been termed a "light practice," demonstrating how it facilitates interactivity and moments of community creation online. Specifically, I analyze user comments on expert-written blogs that appear on an English-language weight loss website, showing how posters collaboratively initiate,…

This article focuses on a preservice teacher's participation in an online book club using professional literature. The purpose of this study was to understand how one student's participation within an online book club on teaching contributed to a shifting in pedagogical beliefs. Data include online discussion transcripts and end-of-course…

This study explores asynchronous online discussions as a learning strategy for Japanese EFL students from various perspectives. A text analysis of learner posts and replies was performed to determine the quantity, quality, and accuracy of the written language produced. Student participation rates during all four online exchanges were measured to…

Critical thinking is thought-focused on how to solve a well-defined problem when several alternatives solutions to the problem exist. Because critical thinking may help to build tolerance toward others, the author believes it is a worthwhile subject to investigate, given that people are living in an increasingly multicultural society full of…

Emotions are part of human life, and they are present on several occasions, like decision making and in social interactions. Computational identification of emotions in texts can be useful in many applications, especially in distance learning courses. This research introduces an animated pedagogic agent, integrated to a Moodle virtual learning…

Peer review has been commonly applied to university-level online courses, but less at the high-school level. Little is known about high school students' tendencies when they give reviews to their peers, specifically which posts are more likely to receive reviews. This study adopted social network analysis, regression analysis and content analysis…

The review explores the philosophical basis of the application of Rosenblatt's Reader Response Theory (RRT) to teach reading-to write of literary works in practical senses in EFL contexts across borders. Grounded in the integration of paradigm shift from text- to reader-oriented, critical pedagogy and literacy, and socio-constructivism, reader…