Since 2010, French middle schools with a high enrolment of difficult students have benefited from a compensatory policy called "Écoles Collèges et Lycées pour l'Ambition, l'Innovation et la Réussite" (ECLAIR) (Primary and Secondary Schools for Ambition, Innovation and Success). These difficult students frequently misbehave, disengage…

In the present study, I analyze ethnographic data from a year-long study of two Advanced Placement (AP) Biology classes that enrolled students with diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds. Specifically, I consider participation, positioning, and learning of newcomer Korean students in the focal classes. Building on the notion of figured…

In this article, Leslie Duhaylongsod, Catherine E. Snow, Robert L. Selman, and M. Suzanne Donovan describe the principles behind the design of curricular units that offer disciplinary literacy support in the subject of history for middle school students who represent a wide range of reading levels, and for their teachers, whose own subject matter…

In order to learn from one's own classroom discourse or that of other teachers, one can start by considering that spoken language is always simultaneously propositional and social. When engaged in spoken discourse, people exchange information. This is the propositional function. With the same words they also build and maintain relationships…

This article describes how one of the authors, second-grade teacher Lisa A. Brooks, challenged the raise-your-hand to-speak rule. Her desire to make this change was a result of experiences gained in a graduate class taught by the second author, Juli K. Dixon. Brooks had learned that it is possible to create a classroom community where students…

We assessed the learning approaches and learning styles of a sample of 148 excellent students selected from 11 degrees from nine centers of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain), and we compared the results with those of a sample of 133 average students from the same centers. We found that excellent students took deeper approach than…

The complex notion of the public/private distinction of social spheres has not been systematically investigated in sociolinguistics; particularly in the case of bidialectal kindergarten age children and how they construct their social lives around this distinction in a public environment such as that of school. No simple continuum can clearly…

The use of audience response system (commonly known as clickers) supports communication and interactivity in class by allowing the instructor to ask thought-provoking questions and encouraging students to articulate and reflect their thinking, reveal misconceptions, probe the knowledge and follow their progress in the course. Recent studies on the…

Japanese language learners' proclivity for silence has been alluded to by various writers (e.g. Anderson 1993; Korst 1997; Greer 2000) and is supported by plenty of anecdotal evidence, but large-scale, empirical studies aimed at measuring the extent of macro-level silence within Japanese university L2 classrooms are notably lacking. This article…

This article deals with two prominent topics in the field of mathematics education: the communication in mathematics and its teaching and learning and the continuous professional development of mathematics teachers. In this article, a framework is proposed for analysing the effectiveness of communication in mathematics classrooms. The presentation…

Based on a qualitative analysis of classroom discourse in Italian primary schools, this paper analyses the micro-processes that are emergent moment-by-moment in the unfolding interactions between teacher and pupils. More in particular, our purpose is to identify the conditions under which the interactive orientation of a sequence changes. We argue…

Students as early as elementary school age are capable of learning the aspects of the nature of science (NOS), and the National Benchmarks incorporate the NOS as part of the learning objectives for K-2 students. Learning more about elementary science instruction can aid in understanding how the NOS can be taught or potentially integrated into…

In order to understand withdrawal rates in online K-12 schools, it is vital to have detailed documentation of these rates and to describe characteristics of the students who withdraw compared to the students who remain enrolled. Once these characteristics are known schools can develop programs and/or policies that support students who are at risk…

In this study, we examined the ways in which teachers' statistical knowledge is enacted during instructional practice. Using classroom video recordings from three middle-grades' teachers, we qualitatively analyzed the conversations around a task designed to develop students' knowledge of statistical sampling. Our analyses showed how teachers'…

When student teachers and cooperating teachers have conversations during the student teaching experience, research indicates that they spend considerable time talking about classroom management. In an effort to focus student teaching on the practice of eliciting, understanding and using student mathematical thinking, we altered the structure of…