This research study delves into the multifaceted realm of social presence in online education, encompassing the existence and manifestation of social presence indicators in students' engagement with discussion boards within asynchronous online courses. Social presence manifests when individuals perceive themselves to be simultaneously present with…

Recent efforts in organic chemistry education research focus on investigating activities and strategies designed to elicit students' mechanistic reasoning. This study investigates how a scaffolded case comparison activity implemented in an introductory organic chemistry course elicits and supports students' mechanistic reasoning in an authentic…

In contrast to the field's predominant focus on teacher-led talk in reading contexts, this study considers child-led relaxed conversations about texts. It examines what is afforded by the occurrence of such relaxed book talk and how this is enabled with young children in school. Data are drawn from a co-participative study with four teachers in…

Critical pedagogy employs dialogue that is embodied, reflective, and authentic with aims to promote action toward social justice. Although online learning is well suited to support several characteristics of critical dialogue (i.e., participant diversity, student discussions, emphasis on reflection), it can also be impersonal and disembodied. The…

When the author encountered the C3 Framework, she saw an opportunity to develop a different approach that she hoped would encourage all her students to reach their highest potential. The approach she created--The Deliberative Classroom--has pushed her as much as it has pushed her students. The benefits have been powerful: better academic…

The WWC practice guide "Improving Reading Comprehension in Kindergarten Through 3rd Grade" presents a set of evidence-based practices that teachers and other educators can use to successfully teach reading comprehension to young readers. The guide, developed by a panel of experts, presents a set of evidence-based practices that teachers…

Many undergraduate and graduate courses have been recently converted to fully remote offerings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even within the remote structure, courses vary in their frequency of synchronous and asynchronous meetings. Fostering collaboration through students' idea-sharing and supporting their learning is especially challenging in…

Learning synthetic biology is often seen as a far distant possibility, restricted to those who have the privilege of an academic career. We propose a student-centered discussion group around synthetic biology, aimed at people from high school onwards with different backgrounds to interact and learn about synthetic biology. We developed a 14-week…

Although applied to numerous communication contexts, affordance approaches have yet to receive sustained attention in the instructional literature. The ongoing migration to online pedagogy suggests a need to examine the impact of technological affordances and communication in Learning Management Systems. To that end, an experimental study…

The Conversation Series is a grassroots initiative consisting of monthly discussion events ("Conversations") on topics of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), organized by and for the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology (CCB) at McMaster University. The initiative originated in June 2020 with the #ShutDownSTEM strike, which…

Employing Bernstein's (1990, 2000) concepts of recontextualisation and pedagogic discourse, this case study aims to identify types of discourse and forms of knowledge in primary history lessons, and to explain the observations through teachers' thinking. Two Finnish primary teachers were observed for nine or ten consecutive history lessons and…

Using a dialogic framework as the backdrop to course curriculum, I developed an Oral Communication course for pre-med students with the goal to enhance students' public speaking skills while also incorporating health communication and applied communication research and activities to create opportunities for engagement. I propose best practices for…

This article examines the nature of student-to-student text discussion in a dialogically organized remote classroom. Conducted as teacher research, I investigated student talk in a PreK-1st grade biblical literature class. In the fall of 2020, I taught a biblical literature class to a fully remote PreK-1st grade cohort in a Jewish independent…

This research sets out to enhance students' active learning through group discussion roleplaying. The research recorded the implementation of group discussion in order to find the revision in the teaching-learning process. Classroom action research involving students from a higher institution was used. The data was collected from observations and…

Conversational agents can deepen reasoning and encourage students to build on others' knowledge in collaborative learning. Embedding agents in group work, however, presents challenges where groups may ignore the agents, and this calls for designs where students perceive agents as learning partners. This study examines group interactions with two…