This research overview is an evaluation of knowledge and explores the impact of language linked to mathematics. This particularly in the context of conversations and discussions, on the mathematical understanding of students in the ages between ten to twelve years old. The research overview attempts to examine the role a conversation plays in a concept of learning, specifically in mathematics teaching. With this study we want to create an understanding between the relationship of a rewarding conversation and the understanding of mathematical concepts and systems. Through systematic search and analysis of scientific texts a total of 10 articles were used to gain a proper overview of the subject found through systematic searches of sources such as ERIC, EBSCO and LibSearch. The limitations set for the chosen articles were a timeframe between the years 2011 until 2023, as well as being peer-reviewed. All chosen articles and studies are written in English but originate from different places which provides a wider perspective on the subject. The results show that conversation has an essential role in students' understanding of mathematics. Through correct language that develops in mathematical conversations, a deeper understanding of the subject is created. The research overview also shows the importance of language in shaping students' mathematical knowledge, presenting it as a crucial component of their proficiency in the subject. The research overview further describes the importance of classroom conversations, the teacher's role in the classroom, and the impact of home environments on learning. An aspect related to the subject is how sociocultural thoughts about active learning in a social context reflect the present of Swedish school and its design. By delving deep into the functionality of conversation and the connection between discussion and learning, the school will be able to develop the learning offered in the classroom to better meet the students and their needs. Furthermore, our research concludes that for future educators it is a necessity to balance teacher guidance and student participation in classroom discussions.

Föreliggande studie kommer att belysa ämnet värdegrund. Syftet är att undersöka svensklärares syn på värdegrundsuppdraget samt hur de arbetar med uppdraget inom ramen för svenskundervisningen. Syftet uppnås genom frågeställningar gällande värdegrundsuppdragets betydelse inom svenskundervisningen samt dess möjligheter och utmaningar. Studien riktar sig till undervisning i svenska i årskurserna 4-6 och beskrivs utifrån ett lärarperspektiv med utgångspunkt i den sociokulturella teorin. Studien har genomförts genom en kvalitativ metod där semistrukturerade intervjuer med verksamma svensklärare i årskurs 4-6 använts för datainsamling. Resultatet av studien visar på att lärare ser en betydelse i att integrera värdegrundsuppdraget i svenskundervisningen genom sitt förhållningssätt gentemot elever samt genom berättande material och helgruppsdiskussioner. Det framkom även att skönlitteratur och samtal om läst skönlitteratur öppnar möjligheter för att integrera värdegrundsarbete inom svenskundervisningen samt att läraren har en betydande roll som ledare i elevernas utveckling av normer och värden. / This study will highlight the topic fundamental values. The study aims to explore how teachers view fundamental values education and how they work this within Swedish education. The aim of the study is fulfilled based on questions about the meaning of fundamental values educations within Swedish education and what opportunities and challenges it brings. The study targets education in the Swedish subject in grades 4-6 and is described from a teacher perspective and through the lens of socio-cultural theory. The study is based on a qualitative method where data was collected through semi-structured interviews with working Swedish teachers in grades 4-6. The result of the study shows that teachers’ see a value in integrating fundamental values education within Swedish education through their own approach towards students as well as through narrative material and group discussions. Furthermore, fiction and discussions about fiction was described as an opportunity to integrate fundamental values education within Swedish education and that the teacher has a crucial role as a leader in students’ development of values.

Abstract   This study aims to investigate students' perspectives on three teaching methods within the subject of religious education at upper secondary school: factual teaching, discussions, and meetings with religious representatives. Employing a deductive approach and utilizing Robert Jackson's interpretive approach as the primary theoretical framework, the study explores students' own experiences with these methods. The theory of safe space is employed to further analyse students' perceptions of discussions and their application in secondary education. Research questions delve into how Jackson's interpretive approach can shed light on students' interpretations and how the concepts of Safe and Brave Space can elucidate students' views on discussions as a teaching method. Data are gathered through focus group interviews and analysed using thematic analysis according to Bryman. The results suggest that students' statements align with Jackson's interpretive approach, and that a blend of factual teaching, discussions, and meetings with religious representatives fosters diversity while avoiding the homogenization of religions. Moreover, the results indicate that students yearn for open discussions on contemporary issues, provided they occur in a secure environment to prevent conflicts. The didactic relevance of this study extends to all religious educators, offering insights into student perspectives regarding current teaching methods. Keywords: Religious education, The interpretive approach, Safe space, classroom discussions, teaching strategies

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No description available.

With social media now being ubiquitously used by citizens and political actors, concerns over the incivility of interactions on these platforms have grown. While research has already started to investigate some of the factors that lead users to leave incivil comments on political social media posts, we are lacking a comprehensive understanding of the influence of platform, post, and person characteristics. Using automated text analysis methods on a large body of U.S. Congress Members' social media posts (n = 253,884) and the associated user comments (n = 49,508,863), we investigate how different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter), characteristics of the original post (e.g., incivility, reach), and personal characteristics of the politicians (e.g., gender, ethnicity) affect the occurrence of incivil user comments. Our results show that ~23% of all comments can be classified as incivil but that there are important temporal and contextual dynamics. Having incivil comments on one's social media page seems more likely on Twitter than on Facebook and more likely when politicians use incivil language themselves, while the influence of personal characteristics is less clear-cut. Our findings add to the literature on political incivility by providing important insights regarding the dynamics of uncivil discourse, thus helping platforms, political actors, and educators to address associated problems.

Studiens syfte är att synliggöra och öka kunskapen om skolutvecklande processer i grundskolan med fokus på alla elevers rätt till en likvärdig utbildning. För att uppnå syftet undersöktes vad lärarna fokuserade på i diskussionerna i uppstarten av arbetet och hur fokuset ändrades under arbetets gång samt vilka möjligheter och hinder som blev synliga under processen. För att undersöka detta användes aktionsforskning som ansats och ett projektarbete skapades om tillgängliga lärmiljöer. Studien är kvalitativ och empirin grundar sig på fokusgruppsamtal, loggböcker och intervjuer. För att analysera resultatet från empirin användes teorin om praktikarkitektur vilket även möjliggjorde synliggörandet av sägandet i samtalen utifrån forskningsfrågorna. Teorin om praktikarkitektur är en allmänt vedertagen metod för att analysera resultat från aktionsforskning. Studiens resultat visade att lärarna till en början fokuserade på de hinder de tyckte sig se i praktiken. I samtalen diskuterade de att förutsättningarna för arbetet utifrån elevers varierande behov, klassrumsmiljön och tid. Målsättning med deltagandet fick även det stort utrymme i diskussionerna. En bit in på projektet började lärarna fokusera mer på de positiva effekterna av att arbeta med lärmiljön och den förändrade syn de hade fått om arbetet. Förutsättningar för arbetet fortsatte att ta utrymme i diskussionerna, men innefattade då även ekonomi och samarbete. Möjligheter och hinder synliggjordes. Det som möjliggjorde arbetet var att avsätta tid för arbetet, samarbete och handledning samt en ökad förståelse för lärmiljöns betydelse. Det som hindrade arbetet var tidsbrist, ekonomi och till viss del den solidaritet som fanns i arbetslaget. / The purpose of the study is to highlight and increase knowledge about school development processes in compulsory school with a focus on all students' right to an equal education. To achieve the purpose, it was investigated what the teachers focused on in the discussions at the start of the work and how the focus changed during the work as well as what opportunities and obstacles became visible during the process. To investigate this, action research was used as an approach and a project work was created on accessible learning environments. The study is qualitative and the empirical data is based on focus group discussions, logbooks and interviews. To analyze the results from the empirical data, the theory of practice architecture was used, which also made it possible to make the saying visible in the conversations based on the research questions. The theory of practice architecture is a generally accepted method for analysing results from action research. The results of the study showed that the teachers initially focused on the obstacles they thought they saw in practice. In the conversations, they discussed that the conditions for the work are based on the students' varying needs, the classroom environment and time. The goal of participation was also given a lot of space in the discussions. A bit into the project, the teachers began to focus more on the positive effects of working with the learning environment and the changed view they had gained about the work. The conditions for the work continued to take up space in the discussions, but then also included finances and cooperation. Opportunities and obstacles were made visible. What made the work possible was to set aside time for the work, cooperation and supervision as well as an increased understanding of the importance of the learning environment. What hindered the work was lack of time, finances and, to some extent, the solidarity that existed in the team.

This mixed methods study compared distance and blended undergraduate environmental students at Royal Roads University (RRU) as they participated in online asynchronous PBL case discussion forums as part of an Ecotoxicology course. This study examined the differences between distance and blended teams in their activity, approaches, and levels of critical thinking in an online PBL activity. Critical thinking was evaluated using the cognitive presence indicators of the community of inquiry framework developed by Garrison, Anderson and Archer (2001). An organization indicator was added to the framework to capture posts that organized the discussion forum layout or the team and the distribution of work. The use of the organization indicator in the thread map analysis revealed that teams adopted one of two approaches to the online PBL activity, either an organic approach or an organizational scaffold approach. An open coding approach to content analysis of the posts was used to develop two coding schemes to capture the use of learning scaffolds and degree of online collaboration respectively. These coding schemes were used to compare scaffolding and collaboration behaviours of distance and blended students during the online PBL activity. The study found that whether teams used the online discussion forums or face-to-face discussion as their primary communication method influenced both the timing and the critical thinking content of the online discussion forums. Student moderators’ choices influenced the structure and approach to the PBL activity, as well as the form of document assembly that was observed in the online discussion forums. The learning scaffolds coding scheme demonstrated that both distance and blended students were reading beyond the assigned reading list. Both distance and blended students appeared to develop skills in identifying information gaps over the progression of the PBL case problems as their observable level of critical thinking remained consistent as the problem scaffolding was faded. Although both environmental and non-environmental work experience may be used to scaffold team learning, they are used differently. Online PBL is a good fit for the Royal Roads University Learning and Teaching Model and may be used to provide some consistency across blended and online course content. / Graduate

Thesis (DPhil (Psychology))—University of Stellenbosch, 2006. / This study has two purposes which are complementary: Firstly, an alternative prevention intervention was developed in order to introduce narrative group therapy as a therapeutical practice within preventative interventions in South Africa. Secondly, a training protocol was developed which can be used to train psychologists, counsellors, social workers, teachers and relevant persons to apply narrative group therapy as an alternative preventative intervention in their communities. In the context of this study, the personal stories of the adolescents who took part in this study reflect the problem stories of the Jamestown and Cloetesville community near Stellenbosch. After identifying 20 adolescents who experience problem stories with high-risk themes at two secondary schools in the respective communities, ten narrative group sessions were held, with social constructionism as philosophical approach. The training protocol was primarily of an experiential nature, consisting of 40 hours of training and 12 hours of supervision, with special focus on the personal stories of the four master’s degree psychology students who underwent training and facilitated the group therapy with the adolescents. For the purpose of this study qualitative research was done. During the development of the alternative preventative intervention, a qualitative description was given of the content of the personal stories of the adolescents within the interactional space of narrative group therapy and personal stories. The focus during this qualitative description was the following: • to establish whether the therapeutic process facilitated change, • to develop a new understanding of the therapeutic process by specifically focusing on applying narrative therapy in a group, and • to train and empower narrative-group-therapy facilitators to facilitate the narrative- group-therapy process. In this study two narrative-analytical research methods were used. Firstly, a qualitative narrative-analysis method was used to evaluate the psychotherapeutical transcripts. A part of these sessions was dedicated to this purpose and is presented in transcribed format. Secondly, the content-analysis method was applied: session data was examined, categories of the adolescents’ and students’ narratives were defined and thematic statements were extracted from the text, classified and sorted into categories or groups. This study provides supportive evidence that narrative group therapy as an alternative preventative intervention can be introduced as a therapeutic practice in South Africa. In addition, an effective training protocol was developed which can be used to train psychologists, counsellors, social workers, teachers and other relevant individuals to use narrative group therapy as an alternative preventative intervention in their communities.

This is a qualitative research that draws on Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis methodology to analyze the discourse practices of the mathematics teacher educators in initial teacher training colleges in Malawi. The study involved four mathematics teacher educators in two teacher training colleges located in two different regions of Malawi. Specifically the study explored the following questions: 1) What are the discourse practices that mathematics teacher educators display in their descriptions of multilingual mathematics classrooms? 2) a) What are the discourse practices that mathematics teacher educators display in a college mathematics classroom? b) How do they make available the discourse practices for the student teachers to draw on? Data was collected through pre-observation interviews, classroom observations, reflective interviews and focus group discussions with the mathematics teacher educators. This study has shown that while there are some disconnections between the discourse practices produced in a school multilingual mathematics classroom and a college mathematics classroom, some of the discourse practices that mathematics teachers produced in a college mathematics classroom reinforces the common discourse practices being produced in multilingual mathematics classroom. There are three common discourse practices that were displayed in a college mathematics classroom. These discourse practices are: Initial-Response-Evaluation (Pimm, 1987), traditional lecturing and group discussions. I observed that the IRE and traditional lecturing discourse practices were accompanied by directive discourses for procedural control, and the procedural discourse was the prevalent discourse in all the discourse practices produced. iv Three major themes have emerged from the data analysis. Firstly, the research findings indicate that the mathematics teacher educators regard multilingualism and the language practices that come with it such as code-switching more as a problem rather than a resource for teaching and learning. Secondly, code-switching in college mathematics classroom is not as spontaneous as is research shows it to be in schools; rather it is very much controlled and restricted. Thirdly, the dilemmas of code-switching as discussed by Adler (1998, 2001) are more acute in teacher training colleges, mainly because of the mismatch in the Language-in-Education Policy (LiEP) in schools and tertiary level.