This article explores cooperative learning in choral conducting education. The five characteristics of cooperative learning identified by Adams and Hamm ((1996). "Cooperative learning: Critical thinking and collaboration across the curriculum" (2nd ed.). Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas Publishers): positive interdependence; face-to-face…

Many faculty interpret student responses to faculty questions as evidence of an actively engaged classroom. Because of this conviction, class participation, whether graded or ungraded, appears in many course syllabi in colleges and universities and is often promoted as the responsibility of students to contribute to the learning environment. Class…

Discussion forums are the primary and most widely used venue for social learning and communication in MOOC context. There has been an interest in the last few years to study the interactions and participation behavior in this environment. This systematic review studied eighty-four papers published between 2013-2017 to provide a state of the art,…

Many educators find that students do not participate actively in class, and are constantly seeking a variety of techniques to encourage student participation. The focus of this paper is to show how simultaneous report and provocative statements can be combined to foster appreciative inquiry, thereby, creating a learning environment with greater…

A comparison study between two different methods of conducting online discussions in an introductory astronomy course was performed to determine if the use of Facebook as an online discussion tool has an impact on student participation as well as student response time. This study shows that students using Facebook for their online discussions…

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been used widely to engage learners in academic discourse for knowledge construction. Due to the features of the task environment, one of the main problems caused by the medium is information overload (IO). Yet the literature is unclear about the impact of IO on student learning. This study therefore…

This paper uses quantitative analytics to study talk-based participation in 100 mathematics classrooms across one racially diverse urban school district in the USA. Using the EQUIP observation tool and hierarchical linear modeling, we characterize the quantity and quality of participation for students across 3025 coded turns, by race and gender.…

Debates have been used to develop critical thinking within teaching environments. Many learning activities are configured as working groups, which use debates to make decisions. Nevertheless, in a classroom debate, only a few students can participate; large work groups are similarly limited. Whilst the use of web tools would appear to offer a…

This paper describes an application of learning analytics that builds on an existing research program investigating how students contribute and attend to the messages of others in asynchronous online discussions. We first overview the E-Listening research program and then explain how this work was translated into analytics that students and…

This study attempts to show how the creation of an innovative scenario, introducing video games and online communities as educational resources in the classroom, facilitates the development of new literacies in the context of participatory culture. The experience described was carried out during the 2010-2011 academic year in a secondary school…

This study explores strategies students use to construct their academic engagement in the social environment of school. The study is based on group interview data collected from 161 sixth (78) and eighth (83) grade students. Students reflected both engaging and disengaging episodes. Data were content analysed. The results show that students…

Discussion forums provide students with accessible platforms for group discussions in e-learning environments. They also help lecturers to track and check student discussions. To improve student learning, it is important for lecturers to identify students' cognitive engagement in discussion forums. Therefore, this study aims to investigate…

This paper describes a research project conducted in collaboration with 10 "pupil co-researchers" (PCRs) and their classes in a secondary school in the Netherlands. The main research tools employed were online and face-to-face group discussions, in which PCRs contributed as consultants, co-designers and assistants. The research proved a…

Asynchronous online threaded discussions are widely recognized as a tool to enhance learning in the virtual classroom. While they can serve as a mechanism for reinforcing material and promoting a deeper understanding of course content, discussion boards often lack rich and dynamic dialogue, and instead serve as a field of obligatory discourse,…

A large literature establishes the benefits of discussions for stimulating student engagement and critical thinking skills. However, we know considerably less about the differential effects of various discussion environments on student learning. In this study, we assess student perceptions concerning the benefits of discussions in an upper-level…