This article explores how two elementary school students responded to their teacher's invitation in a civic classroom to make a difference to the world. We consider how the teacher framed the construct of civic efficacy and how the students refracted these ideas in their navigation of a civic education project. Closely analyzing these students'…

While collaborative Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) have been designed for older students and have been shown to support sense-making behaviors, there has not been as much work on creating systems to support collaboration between elementary school students. We have developed and tested, with 84 students, individual and collaborative versions…

This study examined the social and cognitive interaction patterns of third, fourth, and fifth graders as they collaboratively read on the Internet and responded to an inquiry prompt. Data analysis revealed patterns of cognitive strategy use that intersected with social forms and functions of dialogue. Dyads that exhibited higher levels of…

Cross-cultural friendships and peer interactions are important skills for Latino students to become socially adjusted in U.S. schools. Culturally responsive social skill instruction allows educators to teach essential social skills while attending to the native culture and personal experiences of the students. The present study examined the…

Problem Statement: Within Language Arts instruction the use of teacher-student writing conferences is accepted as an effective strategy for teaching writing. The writing conference allows for an individual one-on-one teacher-student conversation about the students' writing or writing process and provides the student an audience in terms of…

A case study examines a 5th-grade teacher's orchestration of discourse and interaction to create opportunities for English language learners to participate in the repair of mathematical errors during a unit on finding the area of geometric shapes. The findings detail how the teacher used gestures in grounding her questioning, revoicing students'…

Classroom protocols collected within this volume are examples of the protocols from grade 5 developed by the ethnographers associated with Special Study A: "An Ethnographic Study of the Forty Classrooms of the Beginning Teacher Evaluation Study." Twenty teachers at both the second and fifth grades were observed for one week by an…

This study used the Observation Schedule and Record 5V (OScAR 5V) to describe and compare the teaching behaviors of second- and fifth-grade mathematics teachers. The sample included seven second-grade and nine fifth-grade teachers from three elementary schools in a medium sized city. Pupils in the participating teachers' classes were from middle…

The purpose of this research was to understand fifth grade children's cognitive behavior as they wrote, solved and then, in small groups, shared original math story problems. Research questions examined children's: (1) beliefs about math in this problem-writing classroom, (2) math story problem-writing behavior, (3) difficulties with their…