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…

Professional learning communities (PLCs) involve a process of collaboration, focus on student data and best instructional practices, and serve as a way for all students can receive an equitable education. Many schools implementing PLCs considered the term a noun, not a verb, leading to an inequitable education for high school students across…

While focus group discussions have become popular across the communication research field, some researchers have pointed out the importance of studying group interactions within focus groups. However, most researchers used a qualitative approach and mostly explored the interaction between participants or between participants and the moderator.…

Flipped classrooms serve as a new pedagogical approach for teaching and learning, which involves switching from the traditional teacher-centred academic agenda. Unlike the traditional classroom model, the flipped classroom enables students to understand the lesson better while learning at their own pace and enhancing their communication skills…

Using the philosophy of mindfulness is an innovative way to teach about perception. By participating in a mindfulness awareness practice, engaging in an activity with all your senses and being in the moment without judgment, students learn about the concepts of perception and mindfulness; analyze their personal perception process before and after…

This mixed-methods case study explored whether the write-converse-write (WCW) strategy impacted students' science conceptual understanding, as evidenced by their writing, along with the teacher and student perceptions regarding the strategy. The study was conducted in a small school district in northern California with three eighth-grade teachers…

The Advancing Inclusive Mentoring (AIM) Program was created to share best practices in inclusive and positive mentoring with faculty members who work with undergraduate or graduate students on independent research, scholarly, or creative works across disciplines. This hybrid program contains 35 online episodes within six modules and is…

This article shares lessons from committed and inspirational educators from across the country with whom the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) worked in 2020. Their experiences reinforce that nonpartisan teaching about democracy is possible (i.e., not teaching who to vote for, but rather how the system…

Heterogeneity is fundamental to learning and when leveraged in instruction, can benefit racially minoritized children. However, finding ways to leverage heterogeneity toward disciplinary teaching is a formidable challenge and teachers can benefit from targeted support to recognize heterogeneity in STEM, and its relationship to race and racism in…

The Common Core State Standards articulate expectations for student participation in mathematical reasoning, sense making, and discussion. Yet little to no research explores the participation of students with autism in these practices. Drawing on neurodiversity and situated sociocultural theory, this article offers a case study of the mathematics…

This dissertation examines individual, constricted agency in a multilingual environment within the context of a language discussion group and the form of social capital possessed by their Mexican Indigenous diasporic community living on the California Central Coast. The research is based on participant-observation ethnographic work with a language…

The goal of this research study was to find what makes groupwork to be successful. We asked faculty why they give groupwork assignments to their students and what their opinions about the best practices in creating effective groupwork environment for their students are. It was also intended to compare instructors' opinions with research findings…

In this study, the authors examine how emergent bilingual second graders collaboratively constructed textual understandings, a phenomenon they call "intercomprehending," by building on each other's contributions and positioning their ideas in relation to peer ideas. The study traces the interrelationships of the utterances of emergent…

Worldwide, scholars and policymakers have called for teacher education to link fieldwork and coursework. This article examines teacher candidates' opportunities to talk about field placement within their campus coursework as one way of doing so. It reports on survey data (n = 270) and observation data (n = 52 hours) from 3 teacher-education…

Characterizing the nature of students' affective and emotional states and detecting them is of fundamental importance in online course platforms. In this paper, we study this problem by using discussion forum posts derived from large open online courses. We find that posts identified as encoding confusion are actually manifestations of different…