It is commonly observed that during classroom or group discussions some students have greater influence than may be justified by the normative quality of those students' contributions. We propose a 5-component theoretical framework in order to explain how undue influence unfolds. We build on literatures on persuasion, argumentation,…

This study investigated how interaction with peers influenced the ways students managed uncertainty during collaborative problem solving in a 5th-grade class. The analysis focused on peer responses to individuals' attempts to manage uncertainty they experienced while engaged in collaborative efforts to design, build, and program robots and…

This article reports on an ethnographic study of a 10-year-old's pursuit of school-based mathematics across school and home to suggest that participating in school-based mathematics is a cross-setting phenomenon in at least 2 ways. First, I illustrate how accomplishing school-based mathematics literally extends into the home and how individuals…

Providing instruction on spatial geometry, specifically how to calculate the surface areas of composite solids, challenges many elementary school teachers. Determining the surface areas of composite solids involves complex calculations and advanced spatial concepts. The goals of this study were to build on students' learning processes for…

This study examines the nature of teacher participation in the context of a video club. Video clubs are professional development meetings in which teachers watch and discuss excerpts of video from their classrooms. In this study, I adopt a situative perspective to examine how teachers develop in their participation to accomplish the goals of the…

In this study we examined change in students' situational interest as a function of student and task characteristics. Fifth- and sixth-graders (n = 52) were assigned to one of two task conditions that used a different version of a science simulation. The versions differed in how concrete vs. abstract the simulation elements were.…

This study examines the contribution of learner cognitive and motivational characteristics to achievement in science at three grade levels. Specifically, the relations between domain-specific epistemic beliefs about the development and justification of scientific knowledge, achievement goals, knowledge, self-concept, self-efficacy, and achievement…

This study examined the effect of imagery interventions for the presentation of novel science vocabulary to fifth grade learners. Eighty-nine students from two schools in Long Island participated in this study and were randomly assigned to four different instructional interventions: a Picture Presentation method, in which a word was paired with a…

This study investigated the influence of general vocabulary knowledge, science vocabulary knowledge, and text based questioning on the science reading comprehension of three types of students who varied in their English language proficiency. Specifically, grade 5 English-Only speakers, English Language Learners in the United States, and students…

Over the last decade, researchers have become increasingly interested in students' beliefs about the nature of knowledge and how these beliefs develop. Although initial psychological accounts portrayed epistemic development as a domain-independent process of cognitive maturation, recent studies have found trajectories of epistemic development to…

This article develops a situative approach to explaining the transfer of learning, illustrating it using a challenging-to-explain case from a Fostering Communities of Learners classroom. The case involved a group of 5th graders who learned and then transferred a more sophisticated way of explaining species survival and endangerment despite…

This article extends and strengthens the knowledge in pieces perspective (diSessa, 1988, 1993) by applying core components to analyze how 5th-grade students with computational knowledge of whole-number multiplication and connections between multiplication and discrete arrays constructed understandings of area and ways of using representations to…

In this article, we elaborate methodologies to study construction of knowledge in argumentative activities. For this purpose, we report on a quasi-empirical study on construction of knowledge through successive argumentative activities on a controversial issue. A group of 120 fifth grade students participated in successive argumentative…