We examine how extended engagement in argumentation with peers leads to enhanced metalevel understanding of argumentive discourse. Following such engagement, young adolescents demonstrated enhanced understanding of counterargument and use of evidence as objectives of skilled argumentation, relative to a nonparticipating comparison group. Among the…

Previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of particular instructional practices that support students' constructions of the partitive unit fraction scheme and measurement concepts for fractions. Another body of research has demonstrated the power of a particular mental operation--the splitting operation--in supporting students'…

This study examines epistemic thinking in action in order to shed light on the relation between students' personal epistemologies and their online learning practices. The study is based on observations of the learning behaviors of 6th-grade students (n = 38) during two online inquiry tasks. Data were collected through think-aloud protocols and…

This article examines the pedagogical practices of two science inquiry teachers and their students using a Web-based system called Web of Inquiry (WOI). There is a need to build a collective repertoire of pedagogical practices that can assist elementary and middle school teachers as they support students to develop a complex model of inquiry based…

This study extends prior research on both individual self-regulation and socially shared regulation during group learning to examine the range and quality of the cognitive and behavioral social regulatory sub-processes employed by six small collaborative groups of upper-elementary students (n = 24). Qualitative analyses were conducted based on…

This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2003) work on metarepresentational competence in mathematics and sciences as theoretical and empirical background, it aims to assess children's criteria for representational adequacy of graphical…

In an 8-month teaching experiment, I investigated how 4 sixth-grade students reasoned with reversible multiplicative relationships. One type of problem involved a known quantity that was a whole number multiple of an unknown quantity, and students were asked to determine the value of the unknown quantity. To solve these problems, students needed…

This study builds on two lines of research that have so far developed largely separately: the use of additive methods to solve proportional word problems and the use of proportional methods to solve additive word problems. We investigated the development with age of both kinds of erroneous solution methods. We gave a test containing missing-value…

This study examines presentations of the distributive property (DP) in two widely used U.S. elementary text series and one main Chinese text series along three dimensions: problem contexts, typical problem types within each problem context, and variability in using the DP. In general, the two U.S. texts were found to resemble each other but to…

This report provides evidence of the influence of a tutorial "communication game" on fifth graders' generative understanding of the integer number line. Students matched for classroom and pretest score were randomly assigned to a tutorial (n = 19) and control group (n = 19). The tutorial group students played a 13-problem game in which student and…

Learning science includes learning to argue with "inscriptions": images used to symbolize information persuasively. This study examined sixth-graders learning to invest inscriptions with representational status, in a geographic information system (GIS)-based science investigation. Learning to reason with inscriptions was studied in emergent…

There has been a body of emerging research describing students' understanding of complex systems. This research has primarily studied students understanding of complex phenomena in science. However, complex phenomena are also pervasive in everyday life. Children observe and participate in them daily. How do they reason about such ordinary complex…

The present study contrasts mathematical knowledge that two sixth-grade teachers apparently used when teaching fraction multiplication with the Connected Mathematics Project materials. The analysis concentrated on those tasks from the materials that use drawings to represent fractions as length or area quantities. Examining the two teachers'…

To identify the challenges that students must meet to engage in effective self-directed inquiry, a class was followed for three years, from the fourth through the sixth grades, as they engaged in a sequence of progressively more demanding inquiry activities. Students made substantial progress in understanding the objectives of inquiry, identifying…

Previous research (e.g., De Bock, 2002) has shown that--due to the extensive attention paid to proportional reasoning in elementary and secondary mathematics education--many students tend to overrely on proportional methods in diverse domains of mathematics (e.g., geometry, probability). We investigated the development of misapplication of…