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Many agree that education needs new goals that reflect the demands of the future. These are often called 'Future Skills', referring to the knowledge, attitudes, values, skills, and competencies intended to prepare learners for the future. The need to teach such Future Skills is often cited, justified by the perception that the future will present new challenges for society. However, the various frameworks discussing Future Skills, often created and published without consensus, use hundreds of terms to refer to such skills and competencies, presenting a barrier to discussion of education futures. If we are to design a better future for education, then a cohesive analysis must link and synthesise these isolated frameworks published worldwide. This scoping review utilises thematic analysis and Social Network Analysis to develop meta-categories representing clusters of future skills reported by extant research. Having started with 99 frameworks identified following a systematic search of the literature, which together included 341 different terms, our review identifies nine categories that provide a valuable overview of the field to inform the conceptualisation of Future Skills. Educational practitioners, human resource professionals, policy makers, and educational technology developers can use the meta-categories to prioritise the integration of certain skills into teaching, learning, and retraining. This will help ensure that students and professionals are better prepared to thrive in an uncertain future.

This paper reports on a study of collaborative group work in mathematics. Although collaborative group work is known as one of the important approaches in education, it is still uncertain how group thinking can be measured in various learning contexts. We used the Group Thinking Measure (GTM) test developed by [Wegerif, R., T. Fujita, J. Doney, J. Perez Linares, A. Richards, and C. van Rhyn. 2017. "Developing and Trialing a Measure of Group Thinking." "Learning and Instruction" 48: 40-50.] alongside mathematics tests to measure group thinking and group mathematical thinking. Our participants from Japan (134 pupils, 10-12 year old) and the UK (30 pupils, 11-12 year old) schools undertook the GTM individually and then in a group of three (triad), following which, the same group also solved sets of mathematics problems. From the quantitative results we found that examining whether a group is a Value Added Group or not in their GTM scores is a useful way to identify more mathematically effective groups. From a qualitative analysis of video data of pupils' group work, we also found that successful problem solving might be due to the use of certain strategies. In conclusion, we consider that GTM can be used to indicate which groups are effective in subject areas such as mathematics.

The linked concepts of "scaffolding" and the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) were originally applied to the context of asymmetrical teaching and learning with a teacher or adult explicitly supporting a learner, usually a child, to achieve tasks beyond their ability when working alone. In this paper we investigate how these concepts need to be reconceptualized if they are to be applied to the different context of symmetrical learning amongst groups of peers. We present two separate studies. In the first one we analyze the type of talk used by a group of children from Mexico solving the Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices (RSPM) test together both before and after an intervention program teaching "exploratory talk". Our analysis demonstrates a ZPD created by the way in which they talk together. In the second study we present the comparison of the talk of two groups of children, one from Mexico and the other from the UK, solving together a single matrix from the RSPM test. Our analysis shows how the concept of "scaffolding" can be applied to understand how these groups of children use language to support shared thinking and learning. In both studies we found that applying ideas of "scaffolding" and the ZPD to symmetrical learning required the re-conceptualization of these concepts as characterizations of dynamic processes within dialogues.

This fascinating dialogue raised many questions. In this commentary I will focus on just three questions that particularly stimulated me to further reflection: "why classification?"; "what is ontology?" and "where does agency come from?" [This article provides a commentary on Eugene Matusov and Kiyotaka Miyazaki's "Dialogue on Dialogic Pedagogy" (EJ1148755).]

Creativity is increasingly considered to be an important goal of education. While creativity can be influenced by many noncognitive factors (eg, personality and motivation), creative thinking remains the most important source of creativity. Creative thinking combines several cognitive processes leading to the generation and selection of new and useful ideas or solutions. Divergent thinking or the ability to generate a range of alternative ideas, is a necessary component of creative thinking. Research has explored cognitive strategies to activate divergent thinking. However, such strategies are often abstract and difficult to implement. This study proposes a computer-based cognitive mapping approach to improving divergent thinking as a response to this challenge. The approach enables students to build a computer-based cognitive map that can foster divergent thinking by associating unrelated concept, object or situation (COS), by decomposing a COS into rich details for viewing it from divergent perspectives, and by combining and changing COSs. A quasi-experiment was conducted with high school students. The results have shown promising effects of the approach on improving students' performance and perceived competence in divergent thinking.

In this paper, we take a semiotic/dialogic approach to investigate how a group of UK 12-13-year-old students work with hierarchical defining and classifying quadrilaterals. Through qualitatively analysing students' decision-making processes, we found that the students' decision-making processes are interpreted as transforming their informal/personal semiotic representations of "parallelogram" (object) to more institutional ones. We also found that students' decision-making was influenced by their inability to see their peers' points of view dialogically, i.e., requiring a genuine inter-animation of different perspectives such that there is a dialogic switch, and individuals learn to see the problem "as if through eyes of another," in particular collectively shared definitions of geometrical shapes.

Science is concerned with understanding the world. As such, engaging with the materiality of that world is integral to both empirical experimentation and theorising within science. However, it has been recognised for some time that the way scientists learn about the world and the way that young people learn about science cannot be simply equated. This difference has been pronounced in recent decades by the dominance of constructivist and social-constructivist theories of learning, which focus on the development of concepts in the minds of people. Whilst these theories have yielded insight into the complexity of learning, the role of the material remains undertheorised, not only within practical science inquiry, but also in relation to the broader materiality of classrooms. Through a detailed critical literature review, this paper demonstrates the need for a stronger theoretical frame through which to understand the role of the material in the learning and pedagogy of science. Building upon the gaps and possibilities that this review reveals, we outline a new material-dialogic theory via a synthesis of Barad's Agential Realism and Bakhtinian dialogic theory. The significance of this paper lies in offering a theoretical basis for more effective practice.

Dialogic pedagogy is being promoted in science teacher education but the literature on dialogic pedagogy tends to focus on explicit voices, and so runs the risk of overlooking the important role that material objects often play in science education. In this paper we use the findings of a teacher survey and classroom case study to argue that there is a gap in the way that science teachers think about the role of materials and that this could be addressed by changes in the theory base of teacher training, augmenting the current constructivist and dialogic theory with the addition of new materialism in the form of Barad's "Agential Realism". Our findings suggests that science teachers do not regularly "explicitly" consider the relationship between the material resources they deploy and the dialogic learning taking place. We argue that science teacher training and professional development should pay more attention to the material-dialogic relationships in the learning that emerges in science classrooms.

The Thinking Together educational approach was first developed in the UK to promote the use of exploratory talk in primary classrooms. The approach was then adapted and applied to the very different context of Mexican state primary education. This paper compares the program in Mexico with the program in the UK and concludes that, despite that fact that the relationship between teacher's practice and the approach was much closer in the UK than Mexico, the program appeared to have very similar positive effects on individual reasoning and on the capacity of children to collaborate effectively in groups.

This final article in this special issue on dialogic space discusses some of the themes raised and points towards the future. It begins with a brief recollection of how the idea of dialogic space as a guide to teaching began in the 1990s in research on classroom talk. The articles in this issue show some of the ways in which the use of dialogic space has expanded since then to provide a range of pedagogical tools and insights in different contexts. While rooted in practice, dialogic space also suggests a new theory of education pointing to the importance of not just transmitting knowledge and skills but also expanding dialogue. Challenges to the application of dialogic space theory in education are reflected upon, and the growing role of technology is considered. The paper ends with the relevance of research on dialogic space in education as a way of responding to some of our most pressing problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the development of 11-year-old students' informal inference about random bunny hops through student talk and use of computer simulation tools. Our aim in this paper is to draw on dialogic theory to explain how students make shifts in perspective, from intuition-based reasoning to more powerful, formal ways of using probabilistic ideas. Findings from the study suggest that dialogic talk facilitated students' reasoning as it was supported by the use of simulation tools available in the software. It appears that the interaction of using simulation tools, talk between students, and teacher prompts helps students develop their understanding of probabilistic ideas in the context of making inferences about the distribution of random bunny hops.

The purpose of this study is to explore how an online-structured dialogue environment supported (OSDE) collaborative learning about the nature of science among a group of trainee science teachers in the UK. The software used (InterLoc) is a linear text-based tool, designed to support structured argumentation with openers and "dialogue moves". A design-based research approach was used to investigate multiple sessions using InterLoc with 65 trainee science teachers. Five participants who showed differential conceptual change in terms of their Nature of Science (NOS) views were purposively selected and closely followed throughout the study by using key event recall interviews. Initially, the majority of participants held naïve views of NOS. Substantial and favourable changes in these views were evident as a result of the OSDE. An examination of the development of the five participants' NOS views indicated that the effectiveness of the InterLoc discussions was mediated by cultural, cognitive, and experiential factors. The findings suggest that InterLoc can be effective in promoting reflection and conceptual change.

This article has two purposes: firstly to introduce this special issue on scaffolding and dialogic teaching in mathematics education and secondly to review the recent literature on these topics as well as the articles in this special issue. First we define and characterise scaffolding and dialogic teaching and provide a brief historical overview of the scaffolding metaphor. Then we present a review study of the recent scaffolding literature in mathematics education (2010-2015) based on 21 publications that fulfilled our criteria and 14 articles in this special issue that have scaffolding as a central focus. This is complemented with a brief review of the recent literature on dialogic teaching. We critically discuss some of the issues emerging from these reviews and provide some recommendations. We argue that scaffolding has the potential to be a useful integrative concept within mathematics education, especially when taking advantage of the insights from the dialogic teaching literature.

In this paper, we explore the relationship between scaffolding, dialogue, and conceptual breakthroughs, using data from a design-based research study that focuses on the development of understanding of probability in 10-12 year old students. The aim of the study is to gain insight into how the combination of scaffolding for content using technology and scaffolding for dialogue can facilitate conceptual breakthroughs. We analyse video-recordings and transcripts of pairs and triads of students solving problems using the "TinkerPlots" software with teacher interventions, focusing on moments of conceptual breakthrough. Data show that dialogue scaffolding promotes both dialogue moves specific to the context of probability and dialogue in itself. This paper focuses on episodes of learning that occur within dialogues framed and supported by dialogue scaffolding. We present this as support for our claim that combining scaffolding for content and scaffolding for dialogue can be effective in students' conceptual development. This finding contributes to our understanding of both scaffolding and dialogic teaching in mathematics education by suggesting that scaffolding can be used effectively to prepare for conceptual development through dialogue.