Van Allen (1996) supports a paradigm shift in how Americans think about education, from a view of school as hierarchy to school as continuum. While the relationship between elementary and secondary education is not always visible, teachers can model cooperative learning for students by working as a team across grade levels to solve problem,…

This study examined whether online tool support for regulation promotes student learning during collaborative inquiry in a computer simulation-based learning environment. Sixty-one students worked in small groups to conduct a scientific inquiry with fluid dynamics. Groups in the experimental condition received a support tool with regulatory…

Students investigate energy conversions by collaborating to develop a free standing track of plastic tubing through which a ball bearing moves at the fastest possible speed. Friendly competition leads to discussion of what worked and did not work and to the identification and investigation of underlying principles. (Contains 4 charts.)

A classroom exercise that engages students as a team to develop an intuitive understanding of P-V-T phase behavior of a pure fluid is discussed. This exercise, when implemented in classrooms over a period of three years revealed that the students achieved a deeper level of understanding about phase behavior.

Many courses of study are currently available that address inclusive education and, increasingly, distance education is seen as a flexible and appropriately inclusive way to deliver such courses. In this article a team of colleagues, Kieron Sheehy, Jonathan Rix, Melanie Nind and Katy Simmons, discusses the development of an Open University course,…

This paper focuses on a tool for meaningful, collaborative, interaction in a constructionist music composition environment. In particular, it describes the design and implementation of ''Networked DrumSteps'', an application that allows multiple users in different locations to collaborate in the process of music composition, but without the use of…

A structured research team experience can add a great deal to a graduate student's academic and professional training, and it also can support a positive research culture within a department. In this study, we discuss how one department developed and implemented collaborative learning research teams to enhance students' research experiences. We…

College students operating under related cooperative contingencies (students had to earn individual credit before being considered for group credit) showed more consistent individual and group improvement on exam performance than students operating under unrelated contingencies (individual credit and group credit were independently determined). A…

Ghana is witnessing an increasing number of 2nd generation street children (SGSC) living in the street of Accra, the capital city as a result of many factors including teenage pregnancy among street girls, ethnic conflicts and rural-urban migration. Street presents enormous risks to street children; they are excluded from safe-family environment,…

One thing about the Madison Montessori School that impressed this author is its belief in the power and importance of art in education: that an art program can enhance the power of the core learning programs designed for the children and that art develops the whole child, the whole family, the whole school, and the whole community. Its program,…

This paper describes a method for analysing the learning processes that take place in a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment. The approach is based on tracking the interactions between learners and tutors. Keeping track of meaningful events serves three main purposes: evaluation of the quality of the process, monitoring…

This paper provides an instrumental account of precalculus students' graphical process for solving polynomial inequalities. It is carried out in terms of the students' instrumental schemes as mediated by handheld graphing calculators and in cooperation with their classmates in a classroom setting. The ethnographic narrative relays an instrumental…

The author reviews research indicating that discipline specialists and novices acquire knowledge differently. He argues that teaching professionals need to help students learn how to learn within general knowledge domains. The developmental/sociocultural perspectives of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Luria, and others, which emphasize the inter/intrapersonal,…

In an effort to improve the retention rate in their entry-level information systems course, the authors of this article integrated a team-learning approach into its instructional format. This article describes the steps taken, including how team learning compares with the traditional approach based on lecture with occasional group exercises, and…

Collaboration scripts facilitate social and cognitive processes of collaborative learning by shaping the way learners interact with each other. Computer-supported collaboration scripts generally suffer from the problem of being restrained to a specific learning platform. A standardization of collaboration scripts first requires a specification of…