How do educators and instructional designers assess the effectiveness of the learning environments they design? One important means of ensuring the effectiveness of instruction in distance and face-to-face settings is through provision of learner support. Increasingly, as learners utilize the World Wide Web for collaborative learning, support systems contribute to the processes of learning and ...

Case-based learning formats, in which relevant case information is provided just in time, require teachers to combine their scaffolding role with an information-providing one. The objective of this study is to establish how this combination of roles affects teacher behavior and that, in turn, mediates students’ reasoning and problem solving. Data on actual behaviors, intentions, effects and app...

Appropriate design of collaborative learning activities for students using mobile devices can be supported by different forms of scaffolding provided by peers, by the teacher or by the technology. Building on prior studies in mCSCL (mobile computer-supported collaborative learning), we developed Chinese-PP, a novel in-class mobile synchronous collaborative learning game for constructing Chinese...

This study evaluates the validity of two aggression scales for predicting observations of malicious or disruptive behavior at school. Subgroups of a sample of 1,560 children (age 8.6+/-1.5 years) were assessed using (a) peer nominations of aggression, (b) teacher reports on the Teacher Report Form (TRF) of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) Aggression scale and the peer nomination items, or (c...

The aim of this study is to examine the use scaffolding improve online group-work presentations in English literature classes. Different stages action research such as planning, acting, observation, and reflection are described detail. Three activities (questioning, feedback, providing digital resources) were used present study. Qualitative analysis reveals that teachers' found be useful suppor...

Abstract: In this paper we analyze the impact of classroom peers’ ability on individual student achievement with a unique longitudinal data set covering all Florida public school students in grades 3–10 over a five-year period. Unlike many data sets used to study peer effects in education, ours identifies each member of a student’s classroom peer group in elementary, middle, and high school as ...

This multi-methodological study applied functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate neural activation in a group of adolescent students (N = 88) during a probabilistic reinforcement learning task. We related patterns of emerging brain activity and individual learning rates to socio-motivational (in-)dependence manifested in four different motivation types (MTs): (1) peer-dependent MT, ...