In this study, we work towards a strategy to measure and enhance the quality of interactions in discussion forums at scale. We present a machine learning (ML) model which identifies the phase of cognitive presence exhibited by a student's post and suggest future applications of such a model to help online students develop higher-order thinking. We…

In 16 Flying Start early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings within a Local Authority in Wales, observations of adult-child interactions, using the Sustained Shared Thinking and Emotional Wellbeing Scale (SSTEW), highlighted that interactions that support children's problem solving, curiosity, concept development, and higher-order…

The importance of staying relevant when teaching communication and advertising courses is hardly a new concept nor is the use of modern and evolving technologies to achieve this goal. However, empirically assessing college students' perceptions of online learning when it is a forced choice is an underexplored area. To address this gap and consider…

A discussion forum is a valuable tool to support student learning in online contexts. However, interactions in online discussion forums are sparse, leading to other issues such as low engagement and dropping out. Recent educational studies have examined the affordances of conversational agents (CA) powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to…

The achievement gap has been the focus of a good deal of research, attention, and hopeful new practices, yet it has hardly decreased. Using insights from sociolinguistic and sociocultural studies of classrooms in concert with practices developed by teacher researchers in the tradition of the Brookline Teacher Researcher Seminar, the author…

This study seeks to analyze book group discussions on translated fiction in terms of micro public spheres. The paper explores the potentials of this perspective based on ethnographic data collected through participant observation with reading groups located across Britain. The discussion demonstrates the public sphere in operation beyond the…

Practitioners in the field of pharmacy are often confronted with ill-structured problems. Specifically, pharmacists are tasked with making patient-specific recommendations that are both safe and effective, which requires combining knowledge from the biomedical, behavioral, and pharmaceutical sciences. Given the dynamic nature of pharmacy as a…

This study provides in depth understanding of the occurrence of team learning activities and social--emotional reactions within team meetings and their relationships by observing team meetings. In addition, the teams' assessment regarding both their teamwork and emotions they experienced during their teamwork were investigated by conducting team…

This study explored how research-based physics tutorials help students use argumentation in a small group-work activity. The participants were four first-year non-major physics students taking algebra-based introductory physics course in an urban university in the southeastern region of United States (US). The content analysis was conducted to…

Supporting collaborative discourse with discussion forums in a typical Learning Management System (LMS) remains challenging. This article reports on a design case of an "unLMS" approach, which aimed to devise a networked learning environment not based on an LMS for collaborative discourse in an online course. To support such discourse,…

Student-generated tagclouds provided an intuitive overview of a group of learners' collective knowledge. Although such tagclouds may have the potential to be used as effective learning tools, it has not been clear how students use this tool for knowledge construction. In this paper, we report a two-stage study that investigated college students'…

Group work in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses is an effective means of improving student outcomes, and many different factors can influence the dynamics of student discussions and, ultimately, the success of collaboration. The substance and dynamics of group discussions are commonly examined using qualitative methods such…

This study employed interviews and document analysis to achieve a better understanding of the design and facilitation strategies used by online instructors in a department of educational technology at a large university in the U.S. Some distinctions were found with the literature about what strategies and activities can be used in online…

Critical thinking (CT) is being recognized as an essential skill for students to master in the 21st century. Previous studies have suggested that teaching CT through asynchronous online discussions (AODs) can be one of the effective ways to equip students with such 21st skill in the educational settings. The purpose of this article is to review of…

A considerable body of research shows that individuals who demonstrate a wide variety of metacognitive skills perform better on scientific problem solving. We developed a way of implementing homework in an undergraduate physics course to promote metacognitive skills. This novel homework design includes both an individual and a team phase and was…