Current approaches to workplace learning emphasize designing communities of practice that are intended to support both formal and informal knowledge acquisition. This article presents the design and research of a knowledge-based community of practice for Subaru, based on principles outlined by Scardamalia (2002) and Zhang, Scardamalia, Lamon,…

This paper investigates the complex interactions that occur as teachers meet online to justify and negotiate their assessment judgements of student work across relatively large and geographically dispersed populations. Drawing from sociocultural theories of learning and technology, the technology is positioned as playing a role in either…

Professional teacher communities appear to be positively related to student learning, teacher learning, teacher practice and school culture. Teacher collaboration is a significant element of these communities. In initial teacher training as well as in-service training and other initiatives for teacher learning, collaborative skills should be…

Teachers are searching for new venues through which they may meet stringent professional development requirements. Under competitive funding from NASA's (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Office of Education and the NASA Explorer Schools Project, U.S. Satellite Laboratory, Inc. created a series of live, online, interactive…

We conducted research within a program serving future mathematics and science teachers. Groups of teachers worked primarily online in an asynchronous discussion environment on a 6-week task in which they applied learning-science ideas acquired from an educational psychology course to design interdisciplinary instructional units. We employed an…

This study explored the relationship between literacy learning and technology. A teacher-researcher and a university researcher collaborated on a yearlong study of three intact eighth-grade classes at a middle school in Southern California. Examined were the effect of electronic discussion groups on students' motivation to read and literacy…

Seven teaching and learning tools, including course handouts, threaded discussion forums, and written assignments enhance learning in online courses by enabling students to deepen their understanding of course material and reduce anxiety about the online setting and their performance in the class. These tools have been used in 24 community college…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of an online discussion forum to support practicing elementary school teachers' professional development in mathematics. The forum is structured around teachers' sharing, discussing, and reflection upon the teaching of elementary mathematics. Third grade teachers (N=14) from three different…

One hundred eighty college-level psychology students were asked to rank order 11 activities as to their preference for these activities to be conducted in small discussion groups. All four academic levels preferred discussions over material covered in the text and in lecture, followed by demonstrations of lecture material. (RM)

Describes participation in scholarly electronic forums, or discussion groups, and discusses the implications of such participation for scholars' social networks. Results of an e-mail survey are discussed, data from listserv archives are examined, and future research is suggested. (Contains nine tables.) (Author/LRW)

In this study, constraint-based argumentation scaffolding was proposed to facilitate online argumentation performance and ill-structured problem solving during online discussions. In addition, epistemological beliefs were presumed to play a role in solving ill-structured diagnosis-solution problems. Constraint-based discussion boards were…

There is a conceptual world surrounding writing in schools, and we are conditioned to a particular language about composition and literacy. This study seeks to interrogate the terms composition and literacy at the level of the classroom: to ask what is meant when it is invoked and what it means to the teachers who teach it. The central question of…

This study focuses on how to support students who have to work together in small groups, and who do not know each other, in performing grounding discussion. It compares two different implementations of a script, one using a structured interface, one using a textual instruction, on students' discussion behavior. The experiment involved two…

Background: This study was situated in Singapore, which aims to achieve engaged learning in P-12 schools with the use of educational technology. One of the foci of study among Singaporean educational researchers is a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment that emphasizes collaboration among learners for the coconstruction of…

As part of a multiyear research study on the preparation of educators to use assessment data for instructional improvement, the present study is a pilot test of a research-based professional development intervention for career-technical teachers. Forty-eight educators at nine sites in five states participated in a 1-day workshop followed by…