Educational discourse and digital media: toward co-regulated learning?

Anne-Marie Cotton

This paper reflects upon the triadic pedagogical relationship between teacher, learner and knowledge embodied through the educational discourse. When the discourse becomes dialogic, it implies more involvement and responsibility shared by both actors, teachers and learners, the latter acknowledging an increasing awareness of responsibility and engagement for their learning. The educational discourse also refers to specific socio-communicative practices activated when it is imperative to respond in real time to the ultimate educational questions being: what content is worth transmitting and how to optimally achieve the transmission from teacher and learner’s perspectives?

Adding that virtual environments are conductive to reflection the author analyses the use by a European team of lecturers and Master students of digital platforms set up as vectors of knowledge within an Erasmus programme and questions their added value to the educational discourse.

The findings highlight the nature of the interactions affecting the active participation, performance and learning of the students. Future programmes willing to embed collaborative work focusing on peers mediating each other’s actions toward a joint goal and aiming the use of asynchronous distributed virtual learning environment, could gain from co-regulation as a manifestation of emergent interaction within a Zone of proximal development with a teacher-indirect regulation.

FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT IN THE TEACHING AND LEARNING OF MATHEMATICS: TEACHERS’ AND STUDENTS’ BELIEFS ABOUT MATHEMATICAL ERROR

Athanasios Gagatsis, Paraskevi Michael-Chrysanthou, Theodora Christodoulou, Elia Iliada,Giorgio Bolondi, Ira Vanini,
Federica Ferretti and Silvia Sbaragli

The present paper discusses lower secondary school teachers’ and students’ beliefs about Formative Assessment in mathematics in Cyprus, Switzerland and Italy. Based on teachers’ and students’ beliefs related to formative assessment, this research is an attempt to compare the teachers’ and students’ beliefs in the different countries under study, regarding to the handling of the error in mathematics classroom. In total, 192 teachers and 1108 lower secondary school students participated in the survey and they completed a questionnaire about the formative assessment. The findings of the study reveal that the students’ beliefs in the three countries are identical, whereas teachers’ beliefs about mathematical error differ enough in the particular countries.