Organising peer interactions in academic tasks

2017 ◽  
pp. 57-78
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 116
Author(s):  
Andrea Khalfaoui ◽  
Rocío García-Carrión ◽  
Lourdes Villardón-Gallego ◽  
Elena Duque

Peer interactions in early childhood education play a key role in establishing the first structures of social relationships and foundations for future development. Engaging in social exchanges with different people enriches children’s concurrent and future learning opportunities. Building on the importance of diversifying interactions, interactive groups (IGs) are a specific dialogue-based classroom organization format that creates an inclusive learning environment by allocating students to small heterogeneous groups with an adult volunteer per group. This classroom organization format has produced reported evidence of enhancing social cohesion and academic achievement, mainly in elementary education. However, its potential to foster positive peer interactions in Early Childhood Education among disadvantaged children remains unexplored. Therefore, this case study explores in depth the type and frequency of positive peer interactions in interactive groups in a preschool classroom serving mainly Roma and immigrant children with a very low SES. The results show that in this context, children acknowledge each other’s work and provide help, guidance, and solidarity interactions when solving academic tasks. Our analysis reveals that children internalize the rules and functioning of the IG since those aspects emerge in their conversations during the activity. Implications for practitioners and policymakers are also discussed.


2012 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 74-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Debbie Witkowski ◽  
Bruce Baker

Abstract In the early elementary grades, the primary emphasis is on developing skills crucial to future academic and personal success—specifically oral and written communication skills. These skills are vital to student success as well as to meaningful participation in the classroom and interaction with peers. Children with complex communication needs (CCN) may require the use of high-performance speech generating devices (SGDs). The challenges for these students are further complicated by the task of learning language at a time when they are expected to apply their linguistic skills to academic tasks. However, by focusing on core vocabulary as a primary vehicle for instruction, educators can equip students who use SGDs to develop language skills and be competitive in the classroom. In this article, we will define core vocabulary and provide theoretical and practical insights into integrating it into the classroom routine for developing oral and written communication skills.


2009 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
Corey L. Herd

Abstract Playing with peers is an important part of childhood—what children learn from interacting with one another has enormous impact on both their social and language development. Although many children naturally develop the ability to interact well with peers, some children have difficulty interacting with other children and may miss out on important learning opportunities as a result. Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) can target the peer interactions of young children on their caseload, assuming that they have the knowledge and skills with which to address them. SLP graduate programs have the opportunity to provide future SLPs with both knowledge and skills-based training. This study assessed a graduate program in which three graduate clinicians participated in a preschool program for children with communication disorders; peer interactions were targeted within the program. The students were observed and data was collected regarding their use of peer interaction facilitation strategies in the group sessions both prior to and after they participated in a direct training program regarding the use of such skills. Outcomes indicate that the direct training program resulted in a statistically significant increase in the students' use of different strategies to facilitate peer interactions among the children in the group.


1989 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beth M. Dalton ◽  
Jan L. Bedrosian

The communicative performance of 4 preoperational-level adolescents, using limited speech, gestures, and communication board techniques, was examined in a two-part investigation. In Part 1, each subject participated in an academic interaction with a teacher in a therapy room. Data were transcribed and coded for communication mode, function, and role. Two subjects were found to predominantly use the speech mode, while the remaining 2 predominantly used board and one other mode. The majority of productions consisted of responses to requests, and the initiator role was infrequently occupied. These findings were similar to those reported in previous investigations conducted in classroom settings. In Part 2, another examination of the communicative performance of these subjects was conducted in spontaneous interactions involving speaking and nonspeaking peers in a therapy room. Using the same data analysis procedures, gesture and speech modes predominated for 3 of the subjects in the nonspeaking peer interactions. The remaining subject exhibited minimal interaction. No consistent pattern of mode usage was exhibited across the speaking peer interactions. In the nonspeaking peer interactions, requests predominated. In contrast, a variety of communication functions was exhibited in the speaking peer interactions. Both the initiator and the maintainer roles were occupied in the majority of interactions. Pertinent variables and clinical implications are discussed.


2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Hunter ◽  
Brennan Peters ◽  
Katie Benoit ◽  
Laurel Young ◽  
Yolanda Dawson

Autism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 136236132110186
Author(s):  
Justin A Haegele ◽  
Anthony J Maher

The study examined the subjective experiences of autistic youth regarding the role of peer interactions and relationships in feelings of belonging in integrated physical education classes. The term integrated is used to describe a setting in which all students, regardless of educational needs, are educated in the same physical space. Eight autistic youth (all male, aged 13–18 years) who had received most of their physical education in integrated classes acted as participants. Semi-structured interviews were used to generate qualitative data, which were analyzed using a reflexive thematic approach. Findings are presented in three themes: (a) bullying can lead to self-harm and self-isolation, (b) peer interactions and relationships in the locker room, and (c) peer relationships are based on shared interests and take time to develop. Even though autistic students were educated in the same spaces as their non-autistic peers, feelings of belonging were largely unavailable to them. Lay abstract Recent years have seen calls to amplify the voices of autistic people in research about their subjective experiences. Despite this, we know little about how autistic youth experience integrated physical education, particularly in the United States. The term integrated is used to describe a setting in which all students, regardless of educational needs, are educated in the same physical space. In this study, we sought to explore the perspectives of autistic youth toward their experiences in integrated physical education, and the roles of social interactions and relationships with peers in those experiences. Findings noted that several factors influenced the ways and extent to which our participants interacted with their peers during physical education. Unfortunately, most of our participants recalled experiencing bullying, and that physical education offered an environment where bullying was most frequent and comparatively unique compared to other contexts throughout the school day. The locker room, a space linked to physical education, was of particular concern because of a lack of teacher presence. Despite the negative views of and experiences in physical education, there was evidence of participants actively pursuing to connect with peers in this context. However, most instances where participants recalled pursuing friendship were not welcomed from others, which stunted their sense of belonging in this space. Given the role that belonging plays in what it means “to be included,” our research supports emerging ideas that even though autistic students were educated in the same physical spaces as their non-autistic peers, feelings of inclusion were largely absent.


2021 ◽  
pp. 073563312110308
Author(s):  
Fan Ouyang ◽  
Si Chen ◽  
Yuqin Yang ◽  
Yunqing Chen

Group-level metacognitive scaffolding is critical for productive knowledge building. However, previous research mainly focuses on the individual-level metacognitive scaffoldings in helping learners improve knowledge building, and little effort has been made to develop group-level metacognitive scaffolding (GMS) for knowledge building. This research designed three group-level metacognitive scaffoldings of general, task-oriented, and idea-oriented scaffoldings to facilitate in-service teachers’ knowledge building in small groups. A mixed method is used to examine the effects of the GMSs on groups’ knowledge building processes, performances, and perceptions. Results indicate a complication of the effects of GMSs on knowledge building. The idea-oriented scaffolding has potential to facilitate question-asking and perspective-proposing inquiry through peer interactions; the general scaffolding does not necessarily lessen teachers’ idea-centered explanation and elaboration on the individual level; the task-oriented scaffolding has the worst effect. Pedagogical and research implications are discussed to foster knowledge building with the support of GMSs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tomas Kos

Abstract Although foreign language instruction in mixed-age (M-A) is gaining popularity (Heizmann and Ries and Wicki 2015; Lau and Juby-Smith and Desbiens, 2017; Shahid Kazi and Moghal and Aziz 2018; Thurn 2011), the research is scarce. Drawing from multiple data sources, this study investigated to what extent do peer interactions among M-A and same-age (S-A) pairs aid L2 development and how students perceive their interactions. In this study, the same learners (N=24) aged between 10 and 12 interacted with the same and different age partners during common classroom lessons in two EFL classrooms. The results suggest that both S-A and M-A peer interactions aided L2 development. Although S-A pairs outperformed M-A pairs on the post-test, the results are not statistically significant. The analysis of students’ perceptions revealed that the majority of students prefer working in S-A to M-A pairs. In addition to age/proficiency differences, factors such as students’ relationships and perceptions of one’s own and partner’s proficiency greatly impact how they interact with one another.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2040
Author(s):  
AbdulHafeez Muhammad ◽  
Ansar Siddique ◽  
Quadri Noorulhasan Naveed ◽  
Uzma Khaliq ◽  
Ali M. Aseere ◽  
...  

In the higher education sector, there is a growing trend to offer academic information to users through websites. Contemporarily, the users (i.e., students/teachers, parents, and administrative staff) greatly rely on these websites to perform various academic tasks, including admission, access to learning management systems (LMS), and links to other relevant resources. These users vary from each other in terms of their technological competence, objectives, and frequency of use. Therefore, academic websites should be designed considering different dimensions, so that everybody can be accommodated. Knowing the different dimensions with respect to the usability of academic websites is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) approach has been considered to be a significant method to deal with the uncertainty that is involved in subjective judgment. Although a wide range of usability factors for academic websites have already been identified, most of them are based on the judgment of experts who have never used these websites. This study identified important factors through a detailed literature review, classified them, and prioritized the most critical among them through the FAHP methodology, involving relevant users to propose a usability evaluation framework for academic websites. To validate the proposed framework, five websites of renowned higher educational institutes (HEIs) were evaluated and ranked according to the usability criteria. As the proposed framework was created methodically, the authors believe that it would be helpful for detecting real usability issues that currently exist in academic websites.


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