This paper discusses how primary school students, who are writing together in the context of inquiry learning, explicitly orient to knowing of oneself and others within the peer group. Using Conversation Analysis, we disclose the conversational functions of assertions holding 'I know', 'you know' and 'we know'. First, students position themselves…

This manuscript puts to work "more than human ontologies" drawing on poststructural (rhizomatic) and posthumanist (intra-active) theories by plugging-in concepts with data produced in a second grade Writers' Studio to illustrate why a paradigm shift of "more than human ontologies" is needed. Specifically, how ways of…

We investigated second and third graders' capacity to understand microevolution, given a learning progression leveraging intuitions to build more adequate explanations, problematizing core ideas within scientific practices, and in-depth study of a single domain (botany or animal behavior). The intervention was implemented in both researcher-taught…

This investigation aimed to explore the feasibility of implementing the strategic and interactive signing instruction (SISI) framework and its potential to enhance the signed composition skills of four deaf students in a first/second-grade classroom. SISI was adapted from the existing strategic and interactive writing instruction (SIWI) framework…

Do social cognition and epistemological understanding promote elementary school children's experimentation skills? To investigate this question, 402 children (ages 8, 9, and 10) in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades were assessed for their experimentation skills, social cognition (advanced theory of mind [AToM]), epistemological understanding (understanding…

One of the challenges many learning scientists face is the laborious task of coding large amounts of video data and consistently identifying social actions, which is time consuming and difficult to accomplish in a systematic and consistent manner. It is easier to catalog observable behaviours (e.g., body motions or gaze) without explicitly…

This study examines how bilingual second-grade students perceived of their reading competence and of the work of reading in two contrasting settings where texts were regularly discussed: a monologically organized classroom (MOC) and a dialogically organized classroom (DOC; as determined by prior analysis of classroom discourse). Interview data…

Theories of learning have long emphasized the essential role of social factors in the development of early reasoning abilities. More recently, it has been proposed that the presentation of conflicting perspectives may facilitate young children's understanding of knowledge claims as potentially subjective--one of many possible representations of…

Children and adults rated their own certainty following inductive inferences, deductive inferences, and guesses. Beginning in kindergarten, participants rated deductions as more certain than weak inductions or guesses. Deductions were rated as more certain than strong inductions beginning in Grade 3, and fourth-grade children and adults…

To better comprehend how educational reforms and classroom practice interconnect, we need to understand the epistemic environments created for learning, as well as the pedagogical activities and the modes of classroom discourse related to these activities. This article examines how a particular innovation in English literacy, Strategies for…

During the past few decades, researchers from a cognitive science tradition and a sociocultural perspective on learning have discussed how to understand students' conceptions of the earth. In this article, some of the questions discussed in this debate are elaborated in relation to meaning making in educational settings. The aim is to illustrate…