The Structure of Discourse in Collaborative Learning

Helping behaviour during cooperative learning and learning gains: The role of the teacher and of pupils' prior knowledge and ethnic background

“…What they are doing and not doing affects the quality of pupils' problem-solving process considerably. Teachers who promote complex cognitive communication between pupils boost the quality of peer interactions and performance (Chinn et al, 2000;Gillies & Ashman, 2000). However, teachers seem to have difficulties to teach pupils to use high quality helping behaviour (Gillies, 2003;Meloth & Deering, 1999).…”

“…Pupils often are inclined to ask the teacher for help, since they view the teachers as more able to facilitate learning as compared to their peers (Newman & Schwager, 1993). This is unfortunate since educational research has demonstrated that interactions between peers can augment their learning gains (e.g., Chinn, O'Donnell, & Jinks, 2000;Gillies & Ashman, 2000;Webb & Mastergeorge, 2003). Thus, there is increased interest in the mechanisms that bring about effective peer interactions, that is, the constituents of peer interactions that are related to higher learning gains, the context factors that affect peer interactions, and the relation of peer interactions with learning gains (e.g., Fuchs, Fuchs, Kazdan, & Allen, 1999;Gillies, 2004).…”

Guiding classroom discussions for democratic citizenship education

“…Teaching with discussion is the use of classroom discussion as an instructional strategy, as a means to foster a variety of outcomes that are believed to be important for democratic citizenship. For example, classroom discussion is intended to stimulate students to develop their own personal viewpoints on moral and social issues, to recognise multiple perspectives (Schuitema et al 2009) and to improve their reasoning and critical thinking skills (Chinn, O'Donnell, and Jinks 2000;Ten Dam and Volman 2004;Veugelers 2000). Indeed, research on moral education has shown that classroom discussion on moral dilemmas can enhance students' levels of moral reasoning (Berkowitz et al 2008;Blatt and Kohlberg 1975;Nucci, Creane, and Powers 2015).…”

Writing with peer response using genre knowledge : a classroom intervention study

“…Additional instruction in revision strategies (Mac Arthur et al, 1991;Mullen, 2003;Olson, 1990;Stoddard & MacArthur, 1993) and planning strategies (Englert et al, 1991(Englert et al, , 1992Graham et al, 2005) had a positive influence on global text quality. Effect of peer response with strategy-instruction on transfer tasks was found as well (Chinn, 2000;Graham et al, 2005).…”

“…They included more content elements in their personal narratives, wrote longer informative texts and spent more time to writing. Chinn et al (2000) contrasted two instructional variations during collaboration with peer response in a study with 10-11 years old students who wrote and discussed conclusions of science experiments. The students were randomly assigned to two conditions: in the comparison condition students were asked to compare their texts ('which text is best and which is worst'?…”