This paper describes research on dialogue between teachers and pupils during primary school science lessons, using talk from two classrooms to provide our examples. We consider whether teachers use dialogue to make education a cumulative, continuing process for guiding the development of children's understanding. Case studies of two teachers, using observational data taken from a larger data set, are used to illustrate their use of talk as a pedagogic tool. We also consider the differing extent to which the two teachers highlight for pupils the educational value of talk, and the extent to which they attempt to guide pupils' own effective use of talk for learning. Implications are drawn for evaluating the ways teachers use dialogue, and for professional development. An example is provided of an activity which has been found to help teachers implement dialogic teaching, and which illustrates how such an approach involves organising the structural variety of talk.

Augmented Reality (AR) revolutionizes educational approaches by providing an immersive experience that superimposes virtual 3D elements onto the physical environment. This integration of virtual and real worlds addresses the challenge of understanding abstract concepts by enabling three-dimensional visualization and interaction. This study aims to assess the role of embodied cognition in science learning through AR technology, analyze its impact on collaborative, inquiry-based learning in primary science, and understand students' perceptions of its influence on their engagement and comprehension in collaborative science tasks. Data collection methods for this study included three focus group interviews and five video observations involving ten grade 5 students, totaling 23 participants, in a primary science classroom. The analysis utilized content, thematic, and multimodal frameworks to evaluate student interactions. The findings indicated that the use of AR significantly enhanced the students' learning experiences. Students' comprehension of complex scientific concepts improved through active engagement with 3D models using the AR application. The AR app's 3D virtual shapes encouraged students to move around more during lessons, likely because these shapes were engaging and offered various perspectives. The use of embodied learning was enhanced with the support of AR technology, as students were constantly in motion around the table, using their fingers to manipulate objects and explore 3D forms from different angles.

This paper explores how wikis may be used to support primary education students’ collaborative interaction and how such an interaction process can be characterised. The overall aim of this study is to analyse the collaborative processes of students working together in a wiki environment, in order to see how primary students can actively create a shared context for learning in the wiki. Educational literature has already reported that wikis may support collaborative knowledge-construction processes, but in our study we claim that a dialogic perspective is needed to accomplish this. Students must develop an intersubjective orientation towards each others’ perspectives, to co-construct knowledge about a topic. For this purpose, our project utilised a ‘Thinking Together’ approach to help students develop an intersubjective orientation towards one another and to support the creation of a ‘dialogic space’ to co-construct new understanding in a wiki science project. The students’ asynchronous interaction process in a primary classroom—which led to the creation of a science text in the wiki—was analysed and characterised, using a dialogic approach to the study of CSCL practices. Our results illustrate how the Thinking Together approach became embedded within the wiki environment and in the students’ collaborative processes. We argue that a dialogic approach for examining interaction can be used to help design more effective pedagogic approaches related to the use of wikis in education and to equip learners with the competences they need to participate in the global knowledge-construction era.