Recent evidence for the effectiveness of active learning interventions has led educators to advocate for widespread adoption of active learning in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses. Active learning interventions implement technology and collaboration to engage students actively with the content. Yet, it is…

Although compositionists recognize that student talk plays an important role in learning to write, there is limited understanding of how students use conversational moves to collaboratively build knowledge about writing across contexts. This article reports on a study of focus group conversations involving first-year students in a cohort program.…

As collaborative learning is actualized through evolving dialogues, temporality inevitably matters for the analysis of collaborative learning. This study attempts to uncover sequential patterns that distinguish "productive" threads of knowledge-building discourse. A database of Grade 1-6 knowledge-building discourse was first coded for…

Previous studies have confirmed the benefits of small group sizes in asynchronous online discussions. However, there is no consistency in which small group size is the optimal option for maximizing students' discussion performance. Moreover, few researchers attempted to apply the smallest group size (i.e., one-on-one) to online discussions and…

A critical issue in teacher education is the ongoing support and professional development of novice teachers. This study explores a professional development project, "Reconnect and Recharge," for newly inducted teachers. Participants met three to four times during the school year from 2009 to 2013 to explore their teaching successes and…

In this article the authors discuss the process of designing a digital experience to support prospective teachers to learn to enact an equity-based complex practice of mathematics teaching, namely to notice students' mathematical strengths rather than notice gaps and deficits in their thinking. Lesson"Sketch" is a web-based platform…

The focus of this article is on digital literacy and students' use of digital sources. We are examining how students choose digital video sources when doing group work with tablets in a social studies project. The analysis centers on how students collaboratively negotiate and reason around their choice of video sources during an assignment about…

This paper proposes a way of integrating self-directed reading into a collaborative classroom with formative and summative tasks as well as facilitating integration with the target culture, and familiarity with the target language in a variety of settings. Linking to literature on motivation, and drawing on case-study experience, an approach to…

The group work test is an assessment strategy that promotes higher-order thinking skills for solving context-rich problems. With this format, teachers are able to pose challenging, nuanced questions on a test, while providing the support weaker students need to get started and show their understanding. The test begins with a group discussion…

This study investigates how students who are peripherally positioned in computer science-based, collaborative group work meaningfully engage with the group activity in order to learn. Our research took place in the context of a one-day, all-girl robotics workshop, in which the participants were learning to program robotic devices. A total of 17…

Skills associated with collaborative problem solving (CPS), especially in STEM-related disciplines, are increasingly regarded as essential for success in work and life. In the last decade, simulation-based games have emerged as rich environments for the situated learning of such skills, and are instrumental in the study of CPS because they provide…

Conversational agents constitute a specific type of ITSs that has been reportedly proven successful in helping students in one-to-one settings, while recently their impact has also been explored in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). In this work, we present MentorChat, a dialogue-based system that employs a configurable and…

This study investigates the nature and role of common ground in group learning of mathematics by means of the analytical constructs of "focal projects" and "contextualization." The analysis investigates two students (12-13 years old) playing a dice game, where their task is to distribute a set of markers based on the total of…

In online learning at scale, wherein instructional videos play a central role, interactive tools are often integrated to counteract passive consumption. For example, the forum or discussion board is widely used, and an emerging functionality, danmaku, which enables messages to be synchronized with video playback, has also been utilized recently.…

Our interpretative study that was carried out in a science and engineering oriented university examined the ways students in an introductory biology course perceived their learning in the course that was substantially changed to allow student-centered learning. The instructional change was framed by the view of learning as a sociocultural activity…