The use of literature offers one way of achieving some distance from the disturbing subject of sexual identity, enabling a group to deal with the topic with some degree of dispassion, and facilitating open and productive communication between men and women. (Author)

A semi-structured focus group prompted interaction among 23 human service undergraduates prior to a unique service-learning experience that involved completing a horticultural project and case management tasks with at-risk youth living in a locked psychiatric residential treatment center. The focus group provided an opportunity for university…

Community college developmental education students face numerous obstacles as they proceed through their years of higher education. One specific area of need is students' inadequate vocabularies. Advanced communication skills are an integral part of higher education, so students may be at an academic disadvantage if these skills are not…

The young child's exposure to disaster and trauma through the media or in the social milieu poses a challenge for the early childhood educator who is faced with responding and educating in a developmentally appropriate manner. In the case of public commemoration of a national disaster, the classroom implications are seemingly unavoidable. This…

This study investigates mathematics teacher learning in a video-based professional development environment called "video clubs." In particular, the authors explore whether teachers develop professional vision, the ability to notice and interpret significant features of classroom interactions, as they participate in a video club. Analysis for the…

The integration of e-learning within a distance learning program helps to foster greater interaction among learners who are geographically distant from one another. Various ways have been implemented to achieve this aim, one of which is the use of online forum. Research shows that the use of online forum is capable of fostering a sense of learning…

This paper proposes and explains the design of a prototype learning tool named the DiaCog. The DiaCog visualizes dialog interactions within an online dialog game by using dynamically created cognitive maps. As a purposefully designed tool for enhancing learning effectiveness the DiaCog might be applicable to dialogs at discussion boards within a…

In CSCL research, collaboration through chat has primarily been studied in dyadic settings. This article discusses three issues that emerged during the development of a multi-dimensional coding procedure for small-group chat communication: (a) the unit of analysis and unit fragmentation, (b) the reconstruction of the response structure and (c)…

This paper examines the type of creativity involved in the humorous exchanges that pervade an online discussion board where all interaction and relationships between participants are textually co-constructed. Taking a view of creativity as context-dependent, it considers how participants exploit the particular features of an online environment in…

This article examines the discourse of 10 groups of children during text-based online discussions. Analysis of the discourse in the discussions showed that 8 different rhetorical moves, or argument stratagems, were used by most groups of children, whereas 3 other stratagems were used by 1 group. The use of argument stratagems snowballed; that is,…

While concerns around minority ethnic students and underachievement have attracted considerable attention in educational research, such as in England, few studies have examined those who excel, except as reference to justify the equity of the established system. This paper explores the educational success of British Chinese and Indian students,…

This is a quasi-experimental study that explored the effects of reflective learning on prospective teachers' conceptual understanding, critical thinking, problem solving, and mathematical communication skills and the relationship of these variables. It involved 60 prospective teachers from two basic mathematics classes of an institution of higher…

The telecollaborative project under study involves, on the one hand, Masters students who are studying to become teachers and who design the tasks as well as tutor them, and, on the other hand, French language students. The relationship in this type of telecollaboration has been shown to be both asymmetric and symmetric. The hypothesis this paper…

This study investigated the nature and degree of difference in students' behaviors, participation, and power structures in classroom based online book discussions versus face-to-face discussions using pseudonyms, to determine whether online discussion is a useful adjunct to face-to-face literature circles in involving all students as participants.…

This study was designed to investigate the effects of teaching critical thinking skills (CTS) in a large class through asynchronous discussion forums (ADFs) with the facilitation of teaching assistants. A pretest and posttest quasi-experimental design with a comparison group was employed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The…