Background: The sociocultural turn redefined learning in terms of shifting identities. In recent years, learning scientists have explored the connections between learning and various types of identities, including disciplinary identity, gender, race, and more. In this article we focus on national identity, to understand how it is constructed and…

Background: Studies of group creativity have focused on adults acting in professional settings, with less attention paid to how adolescents collaborate in groups in creative activities. Building on sociocultural perspectives on imagination as a complex capacity in adolescence, this study examines students' creative-imagining processes and the role…

Background: Despite its numerous benefits, dialogic discussion seldom occurs in secondary history classrooms. To examine ways to promote it, this study compared two ninth-grade classes' productive disciplinary engagement (PDE) in a whole-class discussion on the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Methods: The two class sections were comparable academically…

Background: This study is concerned with the ways that patterns of student participation in classroom talk are constructed, focusing on silent students who participate in whole-class conversation to a limited extent. Methods: We conducted an ethnographic survey in two ninth-grade classes. We made video recordings of the lessons and interviewed the…

This paper contributes a theoretical framework informed by historical, philosophical and ethnographic studies of science practice to argue that data should be considered to be actively produced, rather than passively collected. We further argue that traditional school science laboratory investigations misconstrue the nature of data and overly…

Literature can be a powerful resource for adolescents' psychosocial development, as it provides opportunities to experience the world through the perspectives of others and juxtapose these with one's own experiences. However, gaining access to these perspectives requires going beyond literal words on the page to explore interpretive meanings. This…

This article investigates the coconstruction of student identity and engagement in the case of a 9th grader in a project-based algebra classroom that afforded students a great deal of autonomy. The focal student, Terrance, utilized classroom resources to serve both project-related and social functions as he interacted with his peers during…

Evaluating the impact of instructional innovations and coordinating instruction, assessment, and testing present complex tensions. Many evaluation and coordination efforts aim to address these tensions by using the coherence provided by modern cognitive science perspectives on domain-specific learning. This paper introduces an alternative…