Over the last two decades, art teachers and museum educators have increasingly embraced group dialogue to help students make meaning from works of art. To an outside observer, most dialogues about art could appear to be the same. Nevertheless, careful analysis reveals that the spirit and dynamics can differ greatly from one dialogue to the next.…

How can you better harness the powerful social capital that exists within diverse individuals, families, businesses, and schools to make positive impacts in your community? What could you add to your next meeting--a Chamber strategic planning session, an employee wellness program, a non-profit board development--to better connect participants with…

This research study evaluated if a relationship exists between dialogical interaction in an online theological course and student spiritual development. This study examined spiritual formation in light of the Association of Theological Schools (ATS) standards for distance education courses in theological institutions. The population for this study…

The Canadian Education Association (CEA) has just completed a research project that looked at young people's confidence in their learning environments and their future. We know that students' future trust in institutions is significantly shaped by their school experiences, in particular by whether there is an open climate for classroom discussion…

Didactic and laboratory anatomical education have seen significant reductions in the medical school curriculum due, in part, to the current shift from basic science to more clinically based teaching in North American medical schools. In order to increase medical student exposure to anatomy, with clinical applicability, a student-run initiative…

This article describes a seminar process in which poetry is used with student teachers to provide a focal point for reflection and introspection. Through this reflection process, students have been able to reflect deeply and personally on their student-teaching experiences, on their own personalities in the context of those experiences, and on…

The Tribal Marine Science Workshop has run annually since 2010. The workshop takes place at the Kasitsna Bay Laboratory, owned by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and operated by NOAA and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, near Seldovia, Alaska. It is hosted by the Seldovia Village Tribe, sponsored by the Bureau of…

Nanoscale science remains at the forefront of modern scientific endeavors. As such, students in chemistry need to be prepared to navigate the physical and chemical concepts that describe the unique phenomena observed at this scale. Current approaches to integrating nanoscale topics into undergraduate chemistry curricula range from the design of…

Although there is a rich literature on the role of text genre and structure on students' literal comprehension, more research is needed regarding the role of these text features on students' high-level comprehension as evidenced in their small-group discussions. As such, the present study examined the effects of text genre (i.e., narrative and…

Group decision making should be particularly beneficial when group members share unique information, because then a group can make a better decision than each group member alone. This study examined how elementary-school children share unique information during group decision making. Seventy-nine groups of 3 same-sex and same-age 7- and 9-year-old…

We compared the materialization of knowledge integration processes in class discussions that followed troubleshooting (TS) and problem-solving (PS) tasks and examined the impact of these tasks on students' conceptual understanding. The study was conducted in two sixth-grade classes taught by the same teacher, in six lessons that constituted a…

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…

The aim of this study was to develop pre-service science teachers' self-determined motivation toward environment before, after and five months following the environmental course activities guided by self-determination theory. The sample of the study was 33 pre-service science teachers who participated in an environmental science course. This…

Online learning is a growing field of education with a corresponding increase in the use of asynchronous discussion. Asynchronous discussion is a form of interaction that is mediated rather than direct and where there is a time lag in the interactions between discussants. In this paper we conducted a brief narrative review of the literature on…