Professional learning communities can be effective vehicles for teacher learning and instructional improvement, partly because they help change professional culture. However, little is known about "how" these changes occur. We used activity systems analysis to investigate the development of professional learning communities and their…

Much research focuses on what might be possible with digital games in the classroom. This study focuses on what is currently probable and typical. It uses a controlled quasi-experimental design to compare outcomes for students of 13 teachers in 10 diverse urban, suburban, and rural schools. The teachers integrated a set of 55 typical educational…

Central to argument are evidence-based claims, requiring coordination of a claim with evidence bearing on it. We advocate a dialogic approach to developing argument skills and in the work reported here examine the further scaffold of prompts that exemplify functions of evidence in relation to a claim. This scaffold was successful in accelerating…

Most accounts of affect and motivation in the science education literature have discussed them as relevant to, but distinct from, disciplinary pursuits. These include Pintrich's seminal work on affective and motivational factors in learning science (P. R. Pintrich, 1999, 2003; P. R. Pintrich & E. De Groot, 1990; P. R. Pintrich, R. W. Marx,…

This case study examines the role of playful talk in negotiating the "how" of collaborative group work in a 6th-grade science classroom. Here we develop and test a Vygotsky-derived hypothesis that postulates playful talk as a mechanism for identity exploration and group status negotiation. Our findings indicate that students utilized the…

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…

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…