Group work has been a main activity recommended by mathematics education reform. We aim at describing the patterns of interaction between teachers and students during group work. We ask: How do teachers scaffold group work during a problem-based lesson? We use data from a problem-based lesson taught in six geometry class periods by two teachers…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the type, pattern, and complexity of Internet reading strategies used by seven accomplished high school readers. Individual participants performed an academic Internet reading task with the goal of developing critical questions about their chosen controversial topic. Strategies for Internet reading were…

Master narratives frame students' historical knowledge, possibly hindering access to more historical representations. A detailed analysis of students' historical narratives about the origins of their own nation is presented in terms of four master narrative characteristics related to the historical subject, national identification, the…

People often justify history's place in the curriculum by its relationship to citizenship, yet there is little research to help educators picture how people use historical knowledge for civic purposes. This expert-novice study used the think-aloud method to examine how eight political scientists and eight high school students employed…

We illustrate a method, which is modeled on "breaching experiments," for studying tacit norms that govern classroom interaction around particular mathematical content. Specifically, this study explores norms that govern teachers' expectations for the doing of word problems in school algebra. Teacher study groups discussed representations of…

This article aims to account for students' assessments of the plausibility and applicability of analogical explanations, and individual differences in these assessments, by analyzing properties of students' underlying knowledge systems. We developed a model of explanation and change in explanation focusing on knowledge elements that provide a…

This article identifies aspects of argumentation in scientific practice that are key for scientific sense-making and articulates how engagement in these aspects happens both inter-mentally (between people) and intra-mentally (an individual's reasoning). Institutionally, peer review exerts critique on new knowledge claims in science and is…

This article makes a unique contribution to the literature on teachers' racialized sensemaking by proposing a framework of "ideology in pieces" that synthesizes Hall's (1982, 1996) theory of ideology and diSessa's (1993) theory of conceptual change. Hall's theory of ideology enables an examination of teachers' sensemaking as situated within a…

A group of 64 Israeli twelfth-grade students of two different ethnic backgrounds participated in an experiment exploring the effects of argumentative design and social identity on the learning of a charged, ethnicity-related historical controversy. Students were divided into two learning conditions: an argumentative-disciplinary condition and a…

This article presents a way of studying the rationality that mathematics teachers utilize in managing the teaching of theorems in high-school geometry. More generally, the study illustrates how to elicit the rationality that guides teachers in handling the demands of teaching practice. In particular, it illustrates how problematic classroom…

The Teaching for Transformative Experiences in Science (TTES) model is designed to foster transformative experiences (e.g., experiences with science content involving the application of that content in ways that expand perception and value in everyday experience). This study presents a case study of a high school biology teacher learning to…

This study investigates how collaborative knowledge construction within an inquiry learning environment can be assisted with scaffolds that aim to support students' hypothesis generation process. Sixty-six students on a university preparatory track worked collaboratively on a kinematics task. The instructional goal was to develop students'…

A new generation of networked classroom technology immerses students and teachers in the group-level construction of powerful mathematical and scientific concepts. We examine these networks from a sociocultural point of view as a new form of mediating artifact. We present a mixed-method, microgenetic analysis to characterize students'…

Probability is an important idea with a remarkably wide range of applications. However, psychological and instructional studies conducted in the last two decades have consistently documented poor understanding of probability among different populations across different settings. The purpose of this study is to develop a theoretical framework for…

Recent mathematics education reform efforts call for the instantiation of mathematics classroom environments where students have opportunities to reason and construct their understandings as part of a community of learners. Despite some successes, traditional models of instruction still dominate the educational landscape. This limited success can…