State and national standards, including the Common Core State Standards, state that students should be expected to learn to discuss and analyze texts, comprehend ideas in increasingly complex texts, and justify their thinking. Literature circles are an instructional practice suggested by many educational writers as an instructional practice that…

This multiple case study investigated adolescents' participation patterns and trajectories in an integrated STEM plus digital Literacy (STEM+L) project. The project aims to broaden adolescents' participation in integrated STEM+L practices. In the project, fifth to eighth graders worked in small groups of three to four to create multimodal science…

Education utilizes group work to increase social development, engagement, and learning outcomes of students in a less traditional way (Baines, Blatchford, & Kutnik, 2016). However, classroom research claims social status can influence the participation and engagement of group members, creating issues of inclusiveness and equity (Cohen, 1994).…

The current study used a mixed design ANOVA to compare the I-Ready reading comprehension scores of 76 students enrolled in an elementary school in South Texas. A previously untested intervention, a literacy-related social skills group, derived from the constructs of emotional intelligence, was compared to the more orthodox interventions of a…

This qualitative study examined the nature of 5th-grade students' oral and written discourse in relation to their conceptual learning during six science inquiry-based lessons. Qualitative data were collected using small group observations, transcriptions of small group discourse, students' science notebooks, and student interviews. These data were…