This study examines the interaction between students' expressions of empathy and the use of STEM integration in the science classroom. Third space theory provides the context from which this classroom ethnographic qualitative study took place, as it provided an environment in which discourse among students' sociocultural perspectives, life…

The use of problem-based learning (PBL) is gaining attention in the engineering classroom as a way to help students synthesize foundational knowledge and to better prepare students for practice. In this work, we study the discourse interactions between 27 student teams and two instructors in an engineering PBL environment to analyze how…

Engaging in an online course has traditionally been perceived to be a lonely experience, with students busy viewing video lectures, working on problem sets and interacting intermittently with others using asynchronous technologies. More recently, over the past 6-7 years, online courses have become recognized as viable delivery vehicles for online…

There has been increased interest in the transformation of post-secondary level instructional practices in STEM from more traditional to evidence-based practices that are more aligned with how learning occurs. Research has shown that instructional practices are linked to student learning outcomes even when content is unchanged; therefore,…

Research has shown that educators may be reluctant to implement group work in their teaching due to concerns about students partaking in off-task behaviours. However, such off-task interactions have been shown to promote motivation, trust, and rapport-building. This paper details a study in which student groups were video recorded as they engaged…

Previous research indicates the importance of student discourse in the construction of knowledge and the fostering of critical thinking skills, especially in the field of problem-based learning (PBL). Further, a growing body of research on game-based learning (GBL) draws parallels between playing certain types of games and the solving of…

Global efforts to prepare young developing minds for solving current and future challenges of climate change have advocated interdisciplinary, issues-based instructional approaches in order to transform traditional models of science education as delivering conceptual facts (UNESCO, 2014). This study is an exploration of the online interactions in…

While pedagogical and technological affordances of three-dimensional (3D) multiuser virtual worlds in various educational disciplines are largely well-known, a study about their effect on high school students' engagement in introductory programming courses is still lacking. This case study presents students' opinions about their participation in a…

Although students' talk in problem-based learning (PBL) tutorials is the pivotal learning site in PBL, few studies have involved conducting a discourse analysis of this talk. This paper focuses on what we can learn about the PBL process from listening to how PBL students talked about it in naturally occurring talk in tutorials. The illuminative…

Engaging teachers in discussing and analyzing problems of practice has great potential for teacher professional development, yet little is known about how to facilitate such discussion. This study examined the strategies that experienced facilitators used to promote productive discussion among science teachers. Participants were 6 facilitators and…

Interdisciplinary problem-based learning (PBL) aims to provide students with opportunities to develop the necessary skills to work with different health professionals in a collaborative manner. This discourse study examined the processes of collective knowledge construction in Japanese students in the tutorials. Analyses of video-recorded data…

This paper considers the multiple discourses that influence medical education with a focus on the discourses of competence and caring. Discourses of competence are largely constituted through, and related to, biomedical and clinical issues whereas discourses of caring generally focus on social concerns. These discourses are not necessarily equal…

The first day of a course has great potential to set the tone for the entire course, planting the seeds for habits of mind and questioning and setting in motion expectations for classroom discourse. Rather than let the first meeting contain little besides going over the syllabus, the instructor (Lesser) decided to use two sustained open-ended…

This study examines how a first-year biology teacher facilitates a series of whole-class discussions about evolution during the implementation of a problem-based unit. A communicative theoretical perspective is adopted wherein evolution discussions are viewed as social events that the teacher can frame intellectually (i.e., present or organize as…

The goal of this study is to examine how to facilitate cross-cultural groups in problem-based learning (PBL) using online digital tools and videos. The PBL consisted of two video-based cases used to trigger student-learning issues about giving bad news to HIV-positive patients. Mixed groups of medical students from Canada and Hong Kong worked with…