We investigate an interactive teacher-generated drawing strategy in which the teacher constructs a drawing with the help of the students. The students contribute their ideas on how to visualize to-be-drawn concepts, embedded in an interactive process. The present study explored whether learning from a scientific text on plate tectonics could be…

Teacher learning is a huge challenge in instructional change, but relatively little work has carefully examined the mechanisms by which teachers learn, in contrast to the extensive work on programs that help teachers learn and the high-leverage instructional practices that are strong predictors of student learning. Specifically, relatively little…

Prior literature has begun to demonstrate that even young children can learn about complex systems using participatory simulations. This study disentangles the impacts of third-person perspectives (offered by traditional simulations) and first-person perspectives (offered by participatory simulations) on children's development of such systems…

Effective interventions are needed to bolster students' argumentation capacities, an area in which they consistently struggle. Quality Talk (QT) is an approach to small-group classroom discussion shown to support students' oral argumentation with preliminary evidence that it may also bolster students' written argumentation. Teachers often must…

Example-based learning (i.e., studying examples to learn a problem-solution procedure, often alternated with solving practice problems) leads to better learning outcomes than solving practice problems only, and video examples are increasingly being used in online and blended learning environments. Recent findings show that the presentation order…

We report on a multi-year design study of a technology environment called Common Knowledge (CK), designed to support learning communities in K-12 classrooms. Students represent their ideas in the form of notes, add their ideas to a collective knowledge base, and use this knowledge base as a resource for their subsequent inquiries. CK supports…

The adaptive use of strategies, that is selecting a strategy which allows an efficient solution for a given problem, can be considered as an important individual ability relevant in various domains. Based on models of subjects' skills of adaptive use of strategies, two idealized instructional approaches are suggested to foster students in their…

Collaborative learning involves the collaborative regulation of cognitive activities to establish common ground for the coordination of content. Drawing on research on cognitive scripts to embed collaboration in learning, this study examines the effect of the quality of the grounding and testing processes on the quality of the inquiry processes…

This study examines the effects of including interactive graphic organizers into a whole-class PowerPoint lesson as an instructional approach intended to improve student engagement and generative learning in schools. A software application was developed and integrated into PowerPoint that makes it possible for the instructor to fill in empty…

The study sought to determine the effects of teacher-introduced multimodal representations and discourse on students' task engagement and scientific language during cooperative, inquiry-based science. The study involved eight Year 6 teachers in two conditions (four very effective teachers and four effective teachers) who taught two units of…

Our paper builds on the construct of the zone of proximal development (ZPD) (Vygotsky in Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1978) to analyze the relationship between students' answers and the help they receive as they construct them. We report on a secondary analysis of…

This study investigates the design and effectiveness of a video tutorial for software training. In accordance with demonstration-based training, the tutorial consisted of a series of task demonstrations, with instructional features added to enhance learning. An experiment is reported in which a demonstration-only control condition was compared…

Comparing contrasting cases is a promising means to prepare learners for future learning from related direct instruction. The most prevalent type of preparation intervention used in this "case comparison approach" is providing contrasting cases together with comparison prompts. However, if the contrasting cases are complex learners might…

In the present study we investigate what problems adolescents in year-nine compulsory school face when trying to learn to play a song together, how they take on these, and how their teacher responds to these problems. The studied practice, where students are to form a band and learn to play a song together in music class, is an example of…

Eighth grade students in Australia (N = 60) participated in an experiment on learning how to solve percentage change problems in a regular classroom in three conditions: unitary, pictorial, and equation approaches. The procedure involved a pre-test, an acquisition phase, and a post-test. The main goal was to test the relative merits of the three…