Tzu-Jung Lin

The Ohio State University | OSU · Department of Educational Studies

This study reports the preliminary efficacy of an innovative school‐based, technology‐enhanced social – emotional learning program called “mindfulness‐based collaborative social reasoning” (MBCSR) for middle school students. MBCSR was developed by an interdisciplinary team of educational psychologists, mindfulness researchers, computer scientists,...

This paper investigates whether 4th and 5th grade students studying about local and systemic issues (in the U.S. and globally), respectively, in social studies classrooms through four units of technology-enriched instruction differed in their use of affect, logic, and morality related words in discussion posts. Our moderation analysis revealed whil...

Collaborative small-group discussions have the potential to promote reading comprehension, critical thinking, and argumentation. However, few studies have gone beyond cognitive processes to understand the social characteristics of dialogue and their potential contributions to students’ cognitive processing in turn-by-turn dialogic exchanges. This s...

Immersive storytelling (IST) is usually conceptualized within the framework of technologically immersive tools such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. While these tools offer some unique features (such as visual fidelity, interactivity, and embodied, first-person perspective), their level of technological immersion (based on the system’s obj...

Given evidence that adolescent students’ motivation to read and write about literature declines with age, we proffer an approach called dialogic literary argumentation (DLA) that asks students to explore literature through argumentation in pursuit of understanding the meanings and possibilities of being human. This quasi-experimental study compared...

In this study, we used a computerized text analysis tool to understand the use of logic-oriented language, emotion-oriented language, and sociomoral language derived from 662 Flipgrid videos produced by 120 fourth and fifth graders in social studies classrooms. Flipgrid is an online video-based discussion platform providing an educational version o...

Educational Impact and Implications Statement The primary interest of this study was examining the extent to which dual language learners (DLL) and their English monolingual (EM) peers develop their English language skills in the early grades (preschool to Grade 3) under classroom language contexts varying in the degree of cultural and linguistic d...

This study used a short-term longitudinal design to examine the extent to which kindergartners': (a) peer relationships are associated with their school absenteeism; and (b) development of positive peer relationships vary as a function of their time spent in school. To address these aims, data were drawn from 801 kindergartners across 64 classrooms...

Teachers and students construct dialogic spaces that mediate classroom learning. Dialogic space involves multiple voices constructed between individuals, within individuals, or from texts/media (Wegerif, 2007). Supported by technological tools, classroom dialogic spaces can expand from traditional face-to-face or person-text interactions to online...

The present study examines how 4th and 5th grade students choose between using either asynchronous text-based or video-based discussion tools when they express their opinions about controversial social issues. We particularly focus on how their choices are related to their socioeconomic status and online digital citizenship. We analyzed the modalit...

The purpose of this study was to examine whether justifying one’s own social knowledge (moral, societal, psychological) toward complex social-moral issues through collaborative argumentation was associated with the improvement of social perspective taking for elementary students. A total of 129 5th graders (52% female, Mage = 10.98) from six classr...

This qualitative study presents 27 students’ insights about four teachers’ implementation of an immersive Native American history curricular unit designed to equip students with digital skills to critically navigate complex, polarizing social issues. The Digital Civic Learning (DCL) curriculum used Google Suite and Google Classroom or Schoology to...

The current study examined the development of early adolescents’ social perspective taking (SPT) through collaborative small-group discussions. A total of 250 fifth-graders were assigned to three conditions, Collaborative Social Reasoning (CSR) discussions, Read-Aloud (RA) and Regular Instruction (RI). SPT was assessed before and after the interven...

This study explored the relationship between demographic characteristics and kindergarten children's extracurricular activity participation and the association between extracurricular activity participation and children's expressive vocabulary. Results indicated that children's (n = 401 children in 31 classrooms; female = 50.1%; Mage = 5.6 years) p...

State-level policies in Ohio during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States involved physical school closures and work-from-home requirements when possible. Presumably, these policies and resulting impacts on homes with children would alter parent time investments in their children with respect to home-learning activities. In...

Research Findings: The purpose of this study was to test a theoretical measurement model representing four proposed dimensions of the classroom ecology in pre-K to third-grade classrooms. The four proposed dimensions of Classroom Composition, Peer Network and Norms, Teacher Practices, and Student Experiences were evaluated using data collected in 1...

This study investigated how word and child characteristics affect children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words. Participants were fourth- and fifth-graders representing native English speakers (NE) and bilingual learners with fluent English proficiency (FEP) and designated English Learners (EL). Students were taught the meanings of a ser...

Peer isolation poses risks to children's social-emotional and academic development, contributing to internalizing and externalizing problems and school adjustment difficulties. To deepen scholarly understandings of peer isolation in early classroom settings, the current study examined the co-occurrence of child characteristics associated with isola...

Research Findings: Conversing abstract concepts boost children’s language learning. Despite the numerous studies on the linguistic environment of early childhood education settings (ECE), most of this work disregards contextual factors that may influence abstract conversations and omits characteristics of children’s verbal participation in these in...

The present study examines the effectiveness of a three-unit digital social studies curriculum in cultivating elementary students’ civic reasoning and decision making during the pandemic year. Eighty-seven students participated in dialogue-rich activities to collectively resolve critical civic issues. Pre-post changes in civic reasoning and decisio...

This paper investigates whether immersive technology-assisted curricula improve teacher perceptions of elementary students’ moral engagement with social issues, and capacity for collaborative dialogue and activism to understand causes of inequality. Our study is derived from a technology-assisted intervention encouraging civic reasoning about socia...

The present study examines how 4th and 5th grade students’ collective efficacy (N=87) changed across a three-unit digital civic learning social studies curriculum and how students’ engagement related to their collective efficacy. Students participated in small-group discourse and worked with group members to solve civic-related dilemmas. Results fr...

We studied the feasibility of an innovative blended learning curriculum for early adolescents intended to foster citizenship skills through collaborative dialogue. Our curriculum was implemented during the 2020-2021 academic year, which afforded an opportunity to study feasibility under constrained classroom contexts. We conducted qualitative analy...

The joint effects of instructional approach and participant structure on children’s engagement were investigated in 24 fifth-grade classrooms during a six-week unit on wolf management. 96 four-minute episodes sampled from the lesson videos were coded in 30-second intervals for individual students’ momentary cognitive-behavioral engagement, momentar...

We tested whether early adolescents’ fulfillment in basic psychological needs predicts their sense of purpose. Additionally, we investigated how students’ levels of fulfilled psychological needs moderate the association between students’ purpose and different learning goals, respectively. Finally, we explored the role of purpose as a mediator that...

Objective: Our study investigates how changes in family contexts were associated with child behaviors during Ohio's COVID-19 shutdown of early 2020. Background: The COVID-19 pandemic caused major economic and social changes for families. Rapid research was conducted to assess these changes and their potential impacts on child behaviors. Method:...

Based on historical sources and publication records in the early 20th century, we suggest that Vygotsky’s recognition of the ‘paradox’ in human learning and his conceptualisation of advanced thinking were largely influenced by Stanislavski’s work in theatre. In this paper, we offer some evidence for this argument on Vygotsky’s nascent system of con...

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated government-mandated shutdowns disrupted schooling, socialization, and family life for school-aged children during spring 2020. These disruptions may have contributed to increased child behavior problems. Thus, we examined behavior problems in 247 children aged 7 to 9 years during Ohio's shutdown period. We inves...

Students are often concerned about social relationships when negotiating ideas with peers. The issue may be especially salient for shy students, whose behavioral solitude is associated with their inner conflicts – longing for social connections but are overly anxious about peer evaluations. This study examined the associations between shyness and s...

Research Findings: The present study examined the extent to which instructional practices, including curriculum, in pre-K through third grade are vertically aligned. Attention was directed to teachers’ grouping practices, academic content, and pedagogical methods given their importance for students’ learning. Variable- and person-centered analyses...

This study examined the psychological well-being of students enrolled in two gifted programs with different service delivery models. Participants were 292 fifth- and sixth-grade students ( M age = 11.70, SD age = 0.65) enrolled in a gifted math pull-out program ( n = 103), a self-contained gifted program ( n = 90), or a program providing no gifted...

In this conference presentation, we understand elementary school students' experiences using distributed technologies in social studies classroom. Our study was conducted with 87 students (58% 4th grade; 48% girls; 59% White, 22% Black, 14% Asian, 5% Multiracial) from five classes across two Midwestern public elementary schools (the sample from one...

Background: Students form interpersonal and intrapersonal classroom social experiences with peers. While diverse intervention programmes have been developed, few have integrated social-emotional learning into academic activities to maximize the potential for learning and development. Aims: This study examined the effects of collaborative small-g...

The current study examined whether students’ social perspective taking (SPT) could be developed through small group argumentative discussions. A total of 250 fifth-grade students were assigned to three conditions: Collaborative Social Reasoning (CSR), Read Aloud (RA), and Regular Instruction (RI). Students’ SPT was assessed before and after the int...

Associations between participation in extracurricular activities and language skills were explored for kindergarteners in a Midwestern school district (N=401). International studies have shown that extracurricular participation can lead to improved language/literacy skills and school readiness. Our work expands previous literature by further examin...

The transition to formal schooling is a large contextual change, which for many children in U.S. begins with the year of kindergarten. To better understand the challenges of this transition, the present study examines the extent to which children experience transition difficulties in five salient areas: making friends, following schedules, meeting...

This mixed-methods study’s main goal was to examine whether teachers’ conflict intervention strategies are contingent upon children’s insistence level (i.e., unwillingness or inability to understand others’ perspectives) and whether this support leads to different outcomes. An additional goal was to understand teachers’ perceptions of peer conflict...

Teacher presence has been considered one of the cornerstones of students’ motivation and engagement in traditional and online education. However, we argue that diminished teacher presence can actually be beneficial for building a democratic, student-led classroom. We hypothesize that this can be achieved through the use of an Open Source Educative...

This study examined the relationships between writing anxiety, writing self-efficacy, and perceived use of revision strategies in high school students with different achievement goals as they learned argumentative writing in English Language Arts classrooms. Three achievement goal orientation profiles emerged from a sample of 307 American high scho...

This study examined the impacts of a collaborative small-group discussion intervention on fifth graders’ use of vocabulary as they reasoned about literature involving complex social-moral issues. A total of 250 fifth graders (120 males and 130 females) from 12 classrooms in two public middle schools in the Midwestern United States participated in t...

Most children experience some form of grouping in the classroom every day. Understanding how teachers make grouping decisions and their impacts on children’s social development can shed light on effective teacher practices for promoting positive social dynamics in the classroom. This study examined the influence of teachers’ grouping strategies on...

Argumentative writing has long been considered an essential skill for disciplinary learning. For researchers and curriculum developers to develop ecologically valid instructional approaches to argumentative writing, a pivotal prerequisite is the understanding of how teachers use various instructional methods in tandem to teach different argumentati...

The present study explored whether a tool for automatic detection and recognition of interactions and child-directed speech (CDS) in preschool classrooms could be developed, validated, and applied to non-coded video recordings representing children’s classroom experiences. Using first-person video recordings collected by 13 preschool children durin...

This comparative case study features two small groups of students engaging in collaborative dialog about social issues. Based on social constructivist theories, the two groups were compared across three major components of the small groups system: social dynamics, intellectual collaboration, and teacher scaffolding. Our goal was to holistically ana...

This comparative case study features two small groups of students engaging in collaborative dialog about social issues. Based on social constructivist theories, the two groups were compared across three major components of the small groups system: social dynamics, intellectual collaboration, and teacher scaffolding. Our goal was to holistically ana...

The current study examined how morphological awareness contributes to reading comprehension across three levels of English proficiency designation. Participants were 377 fourth- and fifth-grade students, including 198 native English speakers (NE group) and two groups of English learners: 117 students with fluent English proficiency (FEP) and 62 stu...

Interactions with teachers and peers are critical for children’s social, behavioral, and academic development in the classroom context. However, these two types of interpersonal interactions in the classroom are usually pursued via separate lines of inquiries. The current study bridges these two areas of research to examine the way in which teacher...

Media use could be detrimental to children’s language and literacy skills because it may displace other language-enhancing activities like shared reading and caregiver-child interactions. Furthermore, the extent to which children use media with adults (joint media engagement), the extent to which they use interactive media (apps/games), and the tim...

Recognizing the potential crisis growing in Ohio families during the pandemic, leaders of ongoing research studies at The Ohio State University Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, came together to design a rapid-response study of family conditions: The Crane Center COVID and Families Study (CCCFS). The CCCFS was designed to provi...

Research Findings Using a sample of 568 students from 61 kindergarten classrooms whose primary caregivers completed a questionnaire describing their child’s early childhood education and care (ECEC) by year from birth to pre-kindergarten, we identified seven pathways characterizing children’s ECEC experiences using a latent class analysis. Once ide...

Research Findings The amount of time and type of program that children experience in early childhood settings may be associated with children’s kindergarten-entry skills, or kindergarten readiness. Taking a person-centered perspective, in the present study, we examined the extent to which reliable and unique profiles of early childhood experiences...

We examined whether participating in in dialogic discussions led to improvement in students’ social knowledge. Fifth-grade students’ social reasoning was assessed before and after six weeks of discussions using an essay task. Poisson regressions with Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) showed that the amount of social knowledge generated during...

Media use is a pervasive aspect of children’s home experiences but is often not considered in studies of the home learning environment. Media use could be detrimental to children’s language and literacy skills because it may displace other literacy-enhancing activities like shared reading and decrease the quantity and quality of caregiver–child int...

This paper discusses the role of Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) in the development of epistemic learner identity. MUVEs might help educa- tors create the types of tasks and intellectual open spaces helping students with learner identity development in the information age. MUVEs can cre- ate new possibilities for dissemination and sharing o...

Classroom social networks are influential to young children’s cognitive, social–emotional, and language development, but assessment and analyses of social networks are complex. Findings have been mixed regarding whether different informants (teachers, children, researchers) are congruent in perceiving classroom social networks. There is also a lack...

This study examined the influence of small-group discussions on early adolescents’ social reasoning development. A total of 147 fifth-grade students (79 males and 68 females) from six classrooms in a public school in Taiwan participated in a pre-post control quasi-experimental study. Classrooms of students were assigned to either a 5-week collabora...

The entry into kindergarten is a key transition children experience and has lasting consequences for their academic development. In light of this, many schools have implemented transition practices designed to foster positive development for children during this time. This study uses qualitative interview data to examine the policies, practices, an...

The linguistic environment of the classroom is influential to young children’s language development. To date, however, literature on the linguistic environment of child-care centers has largely examined teacher practices or children’s aggregate environment, overlooking the child’s first-person experiences and differentiated experiences within the c...