This new text contains parts of Bornstein and Lamb's "Developmental Science, 6th edition", along with new introductory material, providing a cutting edge and comprehensive overview of social and personality development. Each of the world-renowned contributors masterfully introduces the history and systems, methodologies, and measurement and…

Online learning is an important and rapidly growing area, and asynchronous discussions are a vital component of online courses. This doctoral study examined the influence of discussion moderator messages, specifically messages with direct instruction content, had on those discussions. This study obtained data from content analysis of course…

This study investigated how university students behaved and interacted as they were grouped in large and small groups and while they engaged in intra-group and inter-group peer assessment. One hundred forty five students from two classes at a university in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam participated in this one-term study. The students worked in…

The influence of asynchronous discussion in a virtual learning environment, Blackboard, on subsequent coursework grades was examined with 166 psychology students to determine whether asking questions of the tutor online, and/or reading the questions and the given advice, influenced the grades on the report they were writing. A repeated-measures…

Two frequently-used discussion protocols were investigated as part of a program to implement teaching cases in undergraduate educational psychology classes designed for preservice teachers. One protocol involved synchronous face-to-face (FTF) discussion of teaching cases, which occurred in class after students had individually completed written…

This essay presents the theoretical framework and main results of a research on intercultural mediation which has been performed in eight multicultural classrooms of Italian secondary schools. Intercultural mediation is conceived as a form of dialogic communication which should empower empathic and equal relationships between the participants by…

What occurs when an African American woman professor and a European American woman professor review narrative data and interpret what the students write differently? This research illustrates how race and the experience of two ethnically different female researchers impact data analysis of teachers' interactions with narratives of personal past…

The effectiveness of a peer review process for online graduate students is predicated on a balance between "social"- and "task"-directed communications. The defining criteria of learning communities are presented to illustrate the operational meaning of social and the criteria for Critical Thinking used to illustrate the…

When converting from a paper-based distance mode to an online mode of teaching, certain expectations arise that students may engage not only in the development of extended research activity but that the quality of discussion and thinking will change. With access to open-ended discussion within the online forum the opportunity is afforded to…

The purpose of this discussion paper is to explore ways in which professionals working in multi-professional settings can develop their understanding of the different perspectives and knowledge bases of team members in order to build new working practices together. The importance of exploring professional identity in professional development…

The purpose of the study is to examine positions of students and a teacher in dialogic discussion. In this study, dialogic discussion was defined with Bakhtin's (1981) dialogism, Nystrand's (1997) explanation of dialogically organized instruction, and Mercer's (1995) explanation of Exploratory Talk. Studies about literature discussion in…

The purpose of this self study was to discover the values and attitudes I model as a leader to support people in doing their best work. Specifically, do I practice leadership intimacy as defined in this study? Leadership intimacy is defined by addressing these research questions: What values do I lead by? And, what attitudes and practices do I…

The use of electronic audience response systems (ARS) in undergraduate science instruction is increasing. In this article, we argue for combining such a teaching approach with a more active use of student small-group discussions, demonstrating with examples from a Norwegian physics course how "talking physics" is central to the…

Precision teaching emerged from O.R. Lindsley's pristine application of Skinner's natural science of behavior, with a focus on response rate measurement and free operant procedures. When applied with human learners in instructional settings, these first principles led to a series of developments framed in this paper as four kinds of ceilings that…

"The Puppets Promoting Engagement and Talk in Science" project focuses on using puppets to engage children in conversation to develop their thinking about scientific concepts in an inquiring, explorative approach. This project is also about motivating and engaging teachers to link literacy with science in their teaching and learning…