Carla M Firetto

Arizona State University | ASU · Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College

Background Small-group discussions are well established as an effective pedagogical tool to promote student learning in STEM classrooms. However, there are a variety of factors that influence how and to what extent K-12 teachers use small-group discussions in their classrooms, including both their own STEM content knowledge and their perceived abil...

Introductory courses in biology often act as a gateway for students seeking careers in healthcare and science-related fields. As such, they provide a prime entry point for innovations seeking to enhance students’ learning of foundational content. Extant innovations and interventions have been found to positively impact students’ study strategy use...

Collaborative study groups provide crucial learning opportunities for undergraduate students in STEM learning contexts. In this paper, we use a concurrent, nested mixed method design toward two primary aims: (a) to examine whether an instructional module about study groups could increase undergraduate students’ use of study groups and (b) to identi...

Given the rapid pace of technological change, access to unlimited information, and diverse forms of complex text, the importance and demand for enhanced literacy skills is greater than ever. Accordingly, researchers have begun developing integrated, multifaceted interventions that dynamically support enhanced literacy competence. The purpose of thi...

As educators learn about new tools to utilise in their classrooms, there can be questions and ambiguity that accompany the new information; yet they are not always given time or support to address their questions. Acknowledging and embracing the uncertainties that teachers inevitably face when learning about new instructional approaches can help pu...

For high school students to develop scientific understanding and reasoning, it is essential that they engage in epistemic cognition and scientific argumentation. In the current study, we used the AIR model (i.e., Aims and values, epistemic Ideals, and Reliable processes) to examine high school students’ epistemic cognition and argumentation as evid...

Undergraduate STEM students majoring in various science sub-disciplines (e.g. chemistry, physics, engineering) must develop strong understandings of core foundational thermodynamics concepts. The ability for course instructors and researchers to effectively refine instruction and develop interventions to support students’ learning hinges on their a...

The nature of discourse within classrooms strongly predicts students’ ability to think about, around, and with text and content (i.e. comprehension and critical-analytic thinking). However, little is known about the nature of classroom discourse in remote, rural South African schools, a context in which students face well-documented language challe...

Argumentation and scientific discourse are essential aspects of science education and inquiry in the 21st century. Student groups often struggle to enact these critical science skills, particularly with challenging content or tasks. Social regulation of learning research addresses the ways groups attempt to navigate such struggles by collectively p...

Classroom discussions are a common pedagogical approach that involve verbal exchanges of information between teachers and students. Given their importance to teaching and learning, classroom discussions have been the focus of extensive curricular mandates and, to a lesser extent, research over the last several decades. In traditional classroom disc...

Literacy instruction in the 21st century must bolster students’ ability to critically process text and craft well-reasoned written argumentation. The authors investigated changes in fourth-grade students’ (N = 28; 15 girls) written argumentation as they used a researcher-developed graphic organizer (i.e., Quality Talk graphic organizer [QTGO]). The...

Effective interventions are needed to bolster students’ argumentation capacities, an area in which they consistently struggle. Quality Talk (QT) is an approach to small-group classroom discussion shown to support students’ oral argumentation with preliminary evidence that it may also bolster students’ written argumentation. Teachers often must adap...

College students often struggle when they are faced with situations where they are required to read multiple texts and integrate across them. The present study examines an integration task designed to stimulate cross-system integration for college biology students reading about two related physiological systems. Learners (n = 617) were randomly ass...

Students often struggle to comprehend complex text. In response, we conducted an initial, year-long study of Quality Talk, a teacher-facilitated, small-group discussion approach designed to enhance students’ basic and high-level comprehension, in two fourth-grade classrooms. Specifically, teachers delivered instructional mini-lessons on discourse e...

Small-group discussions in which teachers and students interact with text are common in language arts classrooms. As documented in the extant literature, teacher discourse moves affect how the discussion unfolds and the resulting quality of the talk. What is not present in the literature is a unified lexicon or taxonomy for defining and classifying...

We explored the feasibility of using automated scoring to assess upper-elementary students’ reading ability through analysis of transcripts of students’ small-group discussions about texts. Participants included 35 fourth-grade students across two classrooms that engaged in a literacy intervention called Quality Talk. During the course of one schoo...

Small-group, text-based discussions are a prominent and effective instructional practice, but the literature on the effects of different group composition methods (i.e., homogeneous vs. heterogeneous ability grouping) has been inconclusive with few direct comparisons of the two grouping methods. A yearlong classroom-based intervention was conducted...

As reflected in the Next Generation Science Standards, concerns about the adequacy of education and career preparation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields have led to fundamental shifts in the focus of K-12 science education. Such shifts are also highlighted in many of the articles within this special issue, and the i...

Facilitating students’ acquisition of higherorder thinking skills is imperative in the 21st century. Although some types of text have been shown to enhance higherorder thinking, the effects of many novel forms of text have yet to be investigated. As such, the purpose of the present study was to explore the extent to which a relatively novel form of...

Comprehending and critically analyzing complex, content-rich text is an essential requirement of academic excellence as well as a life-long skill for students. Unfortunately, students often struggle to comprehend print and digital media, and subsequently, they are unable to complete essential tasks, such as identifying information, making inference...

Background We tested the effects of an intervention on the learning of introductory thermodynamics principles. This intervention, OEM‐Thermo, is designed to prompt the cognitive operations of meaningful learning: organization, elaboration, and monitoring. We also sought evidence to show that execution of these operations was associated with learnin...

Many American students struggle to perform even basic comprehension of text, such as locating information, determining the main idea, or supporting details of a story. Even more students are inadequately prepared to complete more complex tasks, such as critically or analytically interpreting information in text or making reasoned decisions from rea...

Relational reasoning is the foundational cognitive ability to discern meaningful patterns within an informational stream, but its reliable and valid measurement remains problematic. In this investigation, the measurement of relational reasoning unfolded in three stages. Stage 1 entailed the establishment of a research-based conceptualization of the...

The ability to effectively work in teams is a highly desirable quality in engineering graduates. Building these skills is essential to training students to participate successfully in the workplace. Further, given that much of engineering is taught in a team environment, how well the team functions is directly related to student learning of the cou...

B ackground Even as expectations for engineers continue to evolve to meet global challenges, analytical problem solving remains a central skill. Thus, improving students' analytical problem solving skills remains an important goal in engineering education. This study involves observation of students as they execute the initial steps of an engineeri...

The work described in this paper is part of a multi-year study that seeks to enhance students' ability to create 'models' successfully as they solve problems in Statics. The ultimate goal of the study is to understand the major difficulties that students encounter as they learn to model during problem-solving in Statics and to create interventions...