Insights on students' own authentic design practices--nascent design practices without much adult guidance--are crucial to informing responsive facilitation of engineering design tasks. This study unpacks how elementary students interpret teacher given information about a design task, and interact with each other and given resources, to traverse a…

Findings from qualitative studies reveal an array of discursive supports that peers employ to mediate language and literacy for one another during collaborative and cooperative learning. Quantitative studies posit that enhanced literacy outcomes can result from students participating in these peer mediated tasks. Studies also suggest that the…

This case study focused on the design and implementation of a third-grade vocabulary-enhanced reading intervention for below grade-level readers. The activities aimed to simultaneously engage students in tending to phonological, orthographic, syntactical, and semantic elements of new vocabulary words while also taking into account the vital role…

Get an inside look at the discourse interactions of third- and fourth-grade students as they consider various design proposals to solve an engineering problem and negotiate a group decision. The authors present possible factors that impact student teamwork and provide recommendations for teachers to develop students' skills for group engineering…

In this article, we analysed the collaborative use of tablets (iPads) in a third-grade primary classroom in Norway where the pupils created fairy tales. The pupils worked in groups of five and shared an iPad in their group. We observed and recorded the story's development, which lasted a week, using video recordings and field notes. We explored…

Different schools apply different educational approaches, and different learning concepts interpret knowledge in different ways. The two dominant perspectives classify learning as the acquisition of knowledge, or as participation in school practices. In order to support teachers in choosing the educational method that best fits their teaching…

Improving the quality of education for millions of children worldwide has become a global priority. This study presents results from the first experimental evaluation to test the impact of a universal school-based program on (1) the quality of school interactions (i.e., students' perceptions of the level of support/care and…

This paper reports on a study designed to examine the dialogic processes teachers used to sustain focused discussions, using questioning techniques and Interactive Whiteboards (IWBs). IWBs and their related technologies such as plasma touch screens and projected tablets have passed through several phases of implementation as classroom objects,…

This paper reports the impacts of spontaneous student grouping to develop young students' orthographic awareness in the process of learning Chinese characters. A mobile-assisted Chinese character forming game is used to assign each student a Chinese character component on their smartphones through a wireless network. Fifteen Singaporean students,…

The goal of this study is to identify learners who are most likely to benefit from a small group cooperative learning strategy, which includes tasks involving movement activities. The study comprised 158 learners from five second and third grade classes learning about angles. The research tools included structured observation of each learner and…

This article presents the first results of an investigation in a scholastic context aimed a determining the conditions that favour the acquisition of knowledge in biology within interactions in groups of 4 pupils. There were three work sessions in small groups, and some sessions in class groups. The pupils' conceptions were assessed at the…