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This article reports on the investigation of collaborative learning processes in an online course that examined students' communication during whole-group discussions and small-group activities. Content analysis and social network analysis methods were employed to code and categorize text messages to uncover students' communication behaviour. The results show that individuals' participation patterns were similar during the two different settings, but some inactive students during whole-group discussions were more active in small-groups. The social-out (sent-out messages) during whole-group discussions was a significant variable associated with cognitive contributions in whole-group as well as social and managerial contributions in small-group activities. This article also identified three indices, i.e., quantity, equality, shareness, that can be used as quantitative measures for evaluating small group collaboration. (Contains 4 figures and 6 tables.)

This study investigated a professional learning community of cooperating teachers and university-based teacher educators. To examine our roles and perspectives as colleagues in teacher education, we drew on frameworks in teacher learning and complexity science. Monthly group meetings of this inquiry community were held over two school years in a suburban school district in British Columbia. Participants' current and prior experiences in the role of cooperating teacher provided rich topics for conversation. Our analysis illustrates how aspects of complexity thinking both enable and promote teacher learning, in this instance, the professional development of cooperating teachers. The study highlights (a) key tensions that allow for deeper exploration of issues, (b) the need for flexibility that is open to contingency, (c) the importance of reducing hierarchical structures to enable networks to develop, and (d) improvisation as a key ingredient for teacher learning. (Contains 2 tables, 2 figures, and 2 footnotes.) ["The Teacher Education Conversation: A Network of Cooperating Teachers" was written with Dianne Coulter, Tina Grigoriadis, Stephanie Hardman, Lee Hunter, Jane Kinegal, Bianca Li, Jeff Mah, Karen Mastin, David Partridge, Kathleen Salbuvik, Mitch Ward, Frederick Weil, Janet White, Kang Changyun, and Gaalen Erickson.]

The purpose of this study is to describe the development and validation of a survey that examines science students' social media learning behaviours. Inherent in critiques regarding "digital natives" is a need to better understand what the current generation of learners actually do in their social media practices for "learning". The survey can help us understand how students actually use social media for learning science. Survey development followed an inductive approach [Brinkman, 2013. "Qualitative interviewing". Oxford ebook; Mansourian, 2006. "Adoption of grounded theory in LIS research." "New Library World", 107(9/10), 386-402; Strauss & Corbin, 1998. "Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and technique (2nd ed.)". Newbury Park, CA: Sage], where survey design was informed by results of focus groups with secondary and post-secondary physics students and the survey was iteratively revised after two cycles of administration and validation interviews. The final version of the "Social Media and Science Learning Survey" can be used by educators and researchers to understand how social media tools can be leveraged in order to allow learning to emerge and to use this knowledge to frame recommendations and methods for integrating these tools into classroom-based environments.

This study examined and compared students' understanding of nature of science (NOS) with 521 Grade 8 Canadian and Korean students using a mixed methods approach. The concepts of NOS were measured using a survey that had both quantitative and qualitative elements. Descriptive statistics and one-way multivariate analysis of variances examined the quantitative data while a conceptually clustered matrix classified the open-ended responses. The country effect could explain 3-12% of the variances of subjectivity, empirical testability and diverse methods, but it was not significant for the concepts of tentativeness and socio-cultural embeddedness of science. The open-ended responses showed that students believed scientific theories change due to errors or discoveries. Students regarded empirical evidence as undeniable and objective although they acknowledged experiments depend on theories or scientists' knowledge. The open responses revealed that national situations and curriculum content affected their views. For our future democratic citizens to gain scientific literacy, science curricula should include currently acknowledged NOS concepts and should be situated within societal and cultural perspectives.

We report on the origins, development and refinement of an online inventory to help cooperating teachers focus on selected dimensions of their practice. The Mentoring Profile Inventory (MPI) helps quantify important features of both the motivating and challenging aspects of mentoring student teachers and provides results to respondents in a graphic, easy-to-understand and immediate feedback report (14 sub-scales and 3 summary charts). Psychometric properties of the MPI are shown to be robust. Results can be used individually or collectively to facilitate cooperating teacher professional development by providing the opportunity for dialog around a set of common issues. (Contains 2 figures and 7 tables.)

The teaching of science, especially at pre-college and teacher education levels has undergone tremendous transformation over the years: from teacher-centred transmission to student-centred approaches rooted in constructivism. Whereas constructivism has been charged with all manner of shortfalls, it still can be of benefit to the way physics instructions are organized and implemented. In this paper, the importance of learners' prior knowledge in understanding physics concepts is discussed. This study comprised a case of two cohorts of physics teacher candidates who had strong content knowledge of physics, but lacked pedagogical knowledge as demonstrated by their struggles to implement appropriate grade-level strategies in physics problem solving tasks (which are amenable to a variety of mathematical tool-choices). The case cohorts we used as exemplars to underscore the importance of learners' prior mathematical knowledge. Further, we focus on implications for pre-service teacher preparation, and the effects mathematical tool-choice can bear on students' conceptions. (Contains 1 figure and 2 tables.)

This article reports on a study that investigated students' metacognitive engagement in both out-of-school and classroom settings, as they participated in an amusement park physics program. Students from two schools that participated in the program worked in groups to collectively solve novel physics problems that engaged their individual metacognition. Their conversations and behavioral dispositions during problem-solving were digitally audio-recorded on devices that they wore or placed on the tables where groups worked on the assigned physics problems. The students also maintained reflection journals on the strategies they employed to manage their own understanding as well as learning processes. Prior to the amusement park physics discourse, the students completed a specially developed questionnaire instrument. This provided signposts of the students' metacognitive engagement during group problem-solving at the park and subsequent related physics learning tasks back in the classroom. This data, added to field notes arising from observations, and formal and informal interviews during post-visit learning activities provided the data corpus on the students' metacognitive engagement. Analysis of this data revealed three types of metacognitive engagement during group learning tasks: collaborative and consensus-seeking, highly argumentative, and eclectic, resulting from high levels of dissonance. In both cases, evidence of individual students' deeper understandings, which manifested through students' cognitive and social behaviors, demonstrated the invocation of metacognition to varying degrees. The novel physics problems tackled by the students created situations where discrepancies between their prior knowledge and the direct experiences enabled them to explicate their thinking through dispositions of behavior. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

Students in small rural schools in British Columbia face barriers to accessing senior science courses. A case study employing questionnaire and interview methods sought the perspectives of principals, teachers, and students in the affected schools on this issue. Interpretive data analysis revealed the following barriers as key factors that affect students' successful access to senior science courses: staffing at the school, availability of specialist teachers, trusting relationships between students and teachers, and the school and local cultures. The study considers these factors as constituting a border between students and school science, the crossing of which mediates students' access to the culture of school science.

This paper uses a complexity lens to consider the pedagogical project of culturally responsive mathematics. Need for a new and different theoretical perspectives for Aboriginal education arise from chronic underachievement among Canada's Aboriginal students. Culturally responsive mathematics pedagody as a complex learning system allows a different view into the interrelationships and necessary conditions between culture, education and society, a view that aims to open new possibility for curriculum development, Aboriginal schooling and cultural renewal, while ensuring success for students. A part of the $11 million school project, the Band School Society negotiated with the Federal Aboriginal Affairs Ministry and the building contractors to include apprenticeships for Band members to join the work crew hired to build the new school. For an Aboriginal village of 2000 people and up to 80% unemployment, this was a great opportunity. Interested workers were invited to apply for the positions. All 15 of the respondents were hired immediately, and all needed mathematics upgrading courses to enter the apprenticeships training program. Skilled trades workers were in short supply in the community, and so future employment opportunities were virtually assured after completion of the school project. A local, non-Native adult education teacher was enlisted to run a evening prep course for these newly hired apprenticeships. The course offered focused training in mathematics skills needed by tradespeople, and indeed, these were prerequisite skills for entering the apprenticeship program. On the first night of class, eleven men and women arrived. By week two, group had dwindled to six. When the course was completed at the end of eight weeks, two students earned completion certificates and formally entered the apprenticeship program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]