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'…

The concept of framing from anthropology and sociolinguistics is useful for understanding student reasoning. For example, a student may frame a learning activity as an opportunity for sensemaking or as an assignment to fill out a worksheet. The student's framing affects what she notices, what knowledge she accesses, and how she thinks to act. We…

Instruction abstracted from specific and concrete examples is frequently criticized for ignoring the context-dependent and perspectival nature of learning (e.g., Bruner, 1962, 1966; Greeno, 1997). Yet, in the effort to create personally interesting learning contexts, cognitive consequences have often been ignored. To examine what kinds of…

This study tests the hypothesis that cultural differences in group orientation predict an interaction between the student variable--ethnicity--and a learning context variable--reward structure--on math performance after group learning. One hundred and thirty-two African-American and European-American female and male fourth and fifth grade students…

Using the perspective of instructional conversation, we investigated how one teacher regulated student participation and conceptual reasoning in the middle-school mathematics classroom. We examined the elicitations--questions and provocative statements--made by the teacher over a four-day algebra lesson. Analyses showed how the teacher…

We examine kindergarten children's emerging social meanings about science as a function of their participation in integrated science inquiry and literacy activities associated with the Scientific Literacy Project (SLP). We describe changes in 123 SLP kindergarten children's narrative accounts of learning science in school during three different…

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…

This study reports findings from comparative samples of sixth-grade Chinese and U.S. students' interpretations of the equal sign. Ninety-eight percent of the Chinese sample correctly answered 4 items indicating conceptions of equality and provided conceptually accurate explanations. In contrast, only 28% of the U.S. sample performed at this level.…

Findings about mathematics teachers' beliefs typically involve broad characterizations of those beliefs that are compared with general descriptions of practices. Teacher development research suggests that changes happen effectively from attention to specific practices. Few investigations of beliefs and practices are done at this level of detail.…

This article describes a detailed analysis of knowledge building in a problem-based learning group. Knowledge building involves increasing the collective knowledge of a group through social discourse. For knowledge building to occur in the classroom, the teacher needs to create opportunities for constructive discourse in order to support student…

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 test whether epistemically unproblematic ways of thinking and talking about science could be transformed during preservice teacher training, we designed a system of learning activities based on a set of "heuristics for progressive disciplinary discourse" (HPDD). The HPDD outline six design principles of learning environments where the aim is to…

This study demonstrates an existence proof for "productive failure": engaging students in solving complex, ill-structured problems without the provision of support structures can be a productive exercise in failure. In a computer-supported collaborative learning setting, eleventh-grade science students were randomly assigned to one of two…

There are many meanings of "scientific reasoning" or "scientific inquiry" in use, and many corresponding orientations toward its enhancement and tracking. Deciding what these terms mean once and for all is an elusive and likely chimerical goal. However, setting down some core models might help in being clear on where different researchers stand…