Media literacy is the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms. This understanding of literacy responds to the demands of civic and cultural involvement in an increasingly global and technologically advanced world. "Like literacy, in general, media literacy includes both receptive and…

Student interest is associated with persistence in STEM courses of study (Maltese, Melki, & Wiebke, 2014). If peers decide, of their own accord, to discuss knowledge among each other outside of the classroom context, the behavior is indicative of deepening interest in the information being shared (Renninger & Hidi, 2002). Understanding…

The research team has developed a web-based multiplayer trading card game to allow teachers choosing cards as rewards for students who actively participate in discussions and classroom activities as well as perform well in terms of doing assignments and writing exams or quizzes. In order to verify the effectiveness of the use of in-game cards as…

As enrollment in distance education courses continues to increase, it is clear that online course delivery is here to stay. And all online courses today utilize a web- or cloud-based Learning Management System that includes a text-based discussion forum, commonly called a 'discussion board', which is the primary mode of communication within the…

Rehearsal is an increasingly important teacher education pedagogy. We explore how 3 science teacher educators thought about and used pauses within rehearsals to support secondary science teacher candidates in learning to facilitate sense-making discussions. Video data indicated that the most common purposes for pausing a rehearsal were to provide…

Political division in the United States is the subject of much analysis in the fields of political science and psychology. While political partisanship looms large over discussions of the national political climate's influence on schools and classrooms, very little work exists that directly examines the effects of high school students' political…

Creativity makes life more enjoyable and successful, both for students and people generally. The complex elements of society require that people be creative in order to guide humanity forward. Thus, educators often strive to promote creativity among their students and themselves. The present paper offers a broad definition of creativity and then…

The researchers of this hermeneutic phenomenological study applied Colaizzi's (1978) method to analyze and interpret English Language Arts (ELA) teacher candidates' (TC) learning experiences with literacy quadrants and narratives while attending secondary writing instruction methods courses in diverse institutional settings. Qualitative strategies…

This qualitative study, situated within a critical theory frame (Friere, 1970; Grant, Brown, & Brown, 2016; hooks, 1994; Kincheloe, 2008), explored the ways elementary students engaged in and constructed meaning from critical classroom discussions exploring inequities and injustices as related to gender and race. The questions guiding the…

Characterizing the nature of students' affective and emotional states and detecting them is of fundamental importance in online course platforms. In this paper, we study this problem by using discussion forum posts derived from large open online courses. We find that posts identified as encoding confusion are actually manifestations of different…

This study explored how one third-grade teacher facilitated daily peer-led discussions around articles from a local newspaper. Two students were assigned to select and summarize an article, then lead a whole-class discussion with the teacher's help. The teacher differentially scaffolded engagement with newspaper articles, adaptively responding to…

This paper aims to analyse if virtual forums set up in an environment specifically designed to improve collaborative learning can effectively influence students' discourse quality and learning when compared with those forums set up in a general environment. Following a coding schema based upon the set of scaffolds offered in the Knowledge…

Elicitation techniques are a category of research tasks that use visual, verbal, or written stimuli to encourage participants to talk about their ideas. These tasks are particularly useful for exploring topics that may be difficult to discuss in formal interviews, such as those that involve sensitive issues or rely on tacit knowledge. Elicitation…

Learning analytics focuses on extracting meaning from large amounts of data. One of the largest datasets in education comes from Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) that typically feature enrollments in the tens of thousands. Analyzing MOOC discussion forums presents logistical issues, resulting chiefly from the size of the dataset, which can…

Online courses can feel isolating and sometimes lack human connections that can motivate students. We developed a fully online geoscience course to build a 'Community of Inquiry' with attention to cognitive, social, and teaching presences. We ran the course using nearly identical materials for 8 semesters (recorded video lectures, labs,…