Interdisciplinary approaches to research in the sciences have become increasingly important in solving a wide range of pressing problems at both global and local levels. It is imperative then that science majors in higher education understand the need for exploring information from a wide array of disciplines. With this in mind, interdisciplinary…

These days it is hard not to notice that there is an election going on. Whether glancing at a newspaper, flipping on the TV, or just walking down the street, we see ads and information nearly everywhere. In 2012, my research team's study involving hundreds of adolescents found that the mass media's increased attention to politics can contribute to…

The current divisive presidential election highlights the importance of teaching students the skills of constructive public discourse. This article discusses the role teachers play in teaching students how to exchange ideas, listen respectfully to different opinions and experiences, try out ideas and positions, and give--and get--constructive…

With a goal of better understanding the online discourse within the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) context, this paper presents an open source visualisation dashboard developed to identify and classify emergent discussion topics (or themes). As an extension to the authors' previous work in identifying key topics from MOOC discussion contents,…

Why should teachers bother with student-driven discussions? Elizabeth A. City offers three reasons: (1) talking and thinking reinforce each other; (2) dialogue is a necessary skill of democracy, so schools should teach thinking, speaking, and listening as "practices of freedom"; and (3) student-driven talk is fun. Yet student-driven…

Scotland's "Curriculum for Excellence" affords greater autonomy and flexibility to teachers and schools through advocating curriculum integration and experiential and active learning with greater emphasis on the processes of learning rather than detailed learning outcomes. It is in this context that the present article is grounded. This…

This article examines how a coding scheme for mathematics classroom discussion that was created to highlight how teachers negotiate student responses during whole-class discussion around high-level, cognitively demanding tasks was used to help teachers shift what they notice when analyzing classroom discourse. Data from an intervention that…

In this work, the phenomenon of student enthusiasm was explored in a population of 47 students of Touro Graduate School of Education who took the author's online psychology course. The purpose of the study was to find how students-enthusiasts differ from classmates in their communication style(s) reflected in group discussions on the Discussion…

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 article looks at a simple geometry problem that also involves some reasoning about number combinations, and show how it was used in a Year 7 classroom. The problem is accessible to students with a wide range of abilities, and provides scope for stimulating extensive discussion and reasoning in the classroom, as well as an opportunity for…

Play is considered an important activity of the early childhood years. Research supports the contribution of play to children's development, learning, and well-being. In spite of this, time for play is being pushed out in many early childhood programs by greater time allotted to formal instruction in narrow academic skills to be tested eventually…

This article identifies the principles that informed the design of educative curriculum supports for teaching science texts and reports how elementary teachers chose to use the supports, which included identified learning goals, discussion moves to support sensemaking with the text, and narratives of teachers' uses of text in science teaching. The…

Discourse and argumentation are effective techniques for education not only in social domains but also in science domains. However, it is difficult for some teachers to stimulate an active discussion between students because several students might not be able to develop their arguments. This paper proposes to use WordNet as a semantic source in…

Teaching students how to use and interpret various representations of functions remains an enduring challenge for educators. Providing students access to such representations is a key feature of providing them access to mathematical participation and communication. This study is based on a teaching experiment, which aims to provide students access…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to consider the growing interest in oracy and to propose the pedagogy of process drama as an ideal model for the dialogic classroom. Design/methodology/approach: This paper takes the form of an explanatory case study where the author draws on a successful drama/oracy project in a primary school in Brisbane,…