This study was situated at Mountain Middle School (Pseudonym). Students at Mountain Middle School often engage in collaborative compositions embedded within week-long multidisciplinary and multiage units of study called Odysseys. These units of study and the collaborative composition projects are classified as formal cooperative learning. Johnson…

Learning circles has a long tradition in the Nordic countries as a model for adult non-formal education, but has gained little scholarly attention and is thus sparsely theorised. The purpose of this article is to discuss the revitalisation of learning circles as highly relevant in times of what we term 'social innovation imperatives'. To…

No higher-order skill will be more important for pupils to develop in the twenty-first century than critical thinking. Schools should integrate it into their curricula, thereby allowing students to acquire new skills in preparation for a dynamic and rapidly changing labour market. Educators, psychologists, and philosophers agree on the importance…

Productive talk is structured talk designed to support students in developing a deep understanding of the content (Michaels et al., 2008): a characteristic of high-quality mathematics instruction (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2014). Students who engage in talk during mathematics class have opportunities to make sense of the…

Conversation circles in kindergartens can foster discursive abilities such as argumentation. This paper analyzes argumentation in conversation circles in a kindergarten with respect to the function of narrative argumentation. We focus on second stories as a specific narrative form that is characterized by relating in content and form to a before…

This essay examines a half-term of Year 9 work on "An Inspector Calls," with a particular focus on group discussion, writing in role and class reading of the text. I argue that extensive talking before writing is an invaluable way to elicit pupil insight; I then argue that this is necessarily a collaborative endeavour. I then go on to…

Fractals describe many natural phenomena; their strong visual-figurative nature found its mathematical conceptualization in the concept of self-similarity. In the current study, we investigate how students construct (fully or partially) the self-similarity concept while recursively constructing the Sierpinski triangle, working in small group and…

The current research trend of metacognitive regulation has shifted from an individual to a social context. One such social context is collaborative problem-solving. Interaction between group members is an essential factor in completing collaborative problems. Metacognitive regulation is divided into four forms based on the interaction in…

This descriptive study focuses on using voice activity detection (VAD) algorithms to extract student speech data in order to better understand the collaboration of small group work and the impact of teaching assistant (TA) interventions in undergraduate engineering discussion sections. Audio data were recorded from individual students wearing…

Based on the past sixteen years of experience with an online collaborative endeavor offered across differing university types, as well as modes of instruction, the best practice found that by fostering student peer exchanges on a collaborative web site students reached a high level of achievement in these courses. Findings indicate that despite…

In group activities, students work collaboratively to accomplish specific objectives. Students have to engage and interact with each other in order to complete collaborative assignments. One way that students stay engaged is through asking questions. In the research reported here, we looked at peer-to-peer questions in the context of a…

Active learning, including student thinking and discussion in class, has been shown to increase student learning gains. However, it is less clear how instructor-level variation in the implementation and timing of active learning activities affects student gains. Our study aims to investigate the extent to which the time spent on individual…

A core element of student-teacher partnerships, a form of student participation, is their dialogical nature. However, little research attention has been paid to communication in this context. Therefore, this study aims to gain an in-depth understanding of their deliberative communication patterns. Seventeen deliberative episodes, derived from two…

Laboratory practicals in life science subjects are traditionally assessed by written reports that reflect disciplinary norms for documenting experimental activities. However, the exclusive application of this assessment has the potential to engage only a narrow range of competencies. In this study, we explored how multiple modes of laboratory…

Successful problem-based learning (PBL) often requires students to collectively regulate their learning processes as a group and engage in socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL). This paper focuses on how facilitators supported SSRL in the context of middle-school game-based PBL. Using conversation analysis, this study analyzed text-based…