This study examined how teachers who practice culturally relevant pedagogy describe their work and its challenges. Data is from ten semi-structured interviews with teachers in Vancouver Canada. Analysis revealed four themes in relation to participants' practice to support culturally diverse students: 1) An inclusive classroom of meaningful…

This paper synthesis's three theoretical perspectives, including sociocultural theory, distributed cognition, and situated cognition, into a framework to guide the design and assessment of Web 2.0 practices in higher education. In addition, this paper presents a case study of Web 2.0 practices. Thirty-seven online graduate students participated in…

This study investigates what beginning learners of Chinese perceive as helpful in learning to recognize characters. Thirteen English-speaking participants in a beginning Chinese class answered journal questions and completed a survey over one semester at a large Midwestern university. Findings suggest that participants perceived the usefulness of…

While some studies found positive effects of collaboration on student learning in mathematics, others found none or even negative effects. This study evaluates whether the varying impact of collaboration can be explained by differences in the type of knowledge that is promoted by the instruction. If the instructional material requires students to…

Teachers know it is important to keep their professional knowledge and skills up to date, and presentation-style workshops are an efficient way to accomplish this. However, "one shot," "sit and get" workshops are becoming less effective in today's busy world. Much of the information gained is not likely to be remembered, and even less is likely to…

This paper explores the perceptions of student teachers regarding the extent to which they consider a constructivist approach supports their learning in science. The research was carried out in two phases and drew on questionnaire and interview data. In Phase 1 a questionnaire was used to collect the views of 34 students regarding the…

This paper examines the effects of using weblog technologies to support cooperative learning in higher education. The study focused on the effects of features embedded in weblogs on social interactions, time lags, and cognitive loads. A quasi-experimental control-group research design was adopted. The participants were 115 undergraduates who were…

This study examined students- views of collaboration and learning, and investigated how these predict students- online participation in a computer-supported learning environment. The participants were 521 secondary school students in Hong Kong, who took part in online collaborative inquiry conducted using Knowledge Forum[TM]. We developed a…

This research study investigated the behaviour and interactions of university students as they engaged with ill-structured and well-structured assessment tasks. Twenty students participated in a one-semester intensive design study in a course on "Vietnamese traditional culture". The students worked in five-person groups that were…

Academic writing, individual or collaborative, is an essential skill for today's graduates. Unfortunately, managing writing activities and providing feedback to students is very labor intensive and academics often opt out of including such learning experiences in their teaching. We describe the architecture for a new collaborative writing support…

This paper describes a system called GENTORO that uses a robot and a handheld projector for supporting children's storytelling activities. GENTORO differs from many existing systems in that children can make a robot play their own story in a physical space augmented by mixed-reality technologies. Pilot studies have been conducted to clarify the…

As an area of research that continues to develop, the study of linguistics worldwide presents the opportunity for the improvement of cross-cultural communication through education and research. Language educators are charged with the task of instructing students to effectively communicate across cultures in a multi-lingual world. The…

This new updated fourth edition of "How Good is Our School?" is the result of a wide-ranging consultation through which stakeholders have contributed to the development of a substantially new set of quality indicators and supporting toolkit. This publication is designed to promote effective self-evaluation as the first stage in a process…

This paper introduces Gridcole, a new system that can be easily tailored by educators in order to support the realization of scripted collaborative learning situations. To do so, educators can provide a script specifying the sequence of activities to be performed by learners as well as the tools and documents required to support them. Gridcole can…

Students examine issues surrounding genetic databanks and work in groups to create a biobank of their own, which they write about and illustrate.