On October 18, Richard C. Anderson, the professor emeritus of education and psychology at the University of Illinois, visited the DEP and brought a talk entitled “Promoting Academic Through Collaborative Discussion” A wonderful report on "Acquiring Vocabulary Words Through Collaborative Discussion", and held a discussion with teachers and students of the DEP on the research project, and provided valuable opinions and suggestions.

Interdisciplinary Salon

On the morning of October 18th, at the invitation of the Dep, Professor Anderson, the guest speaker of the fifth interdisciplinary salon of DEP, brought a talked entitle “Acquiring Vocabulary Words Through Collaborative Discussion ". The salon is hosted by Shufeng Ma, the associate professor in the DEP and also a PhD in Educational Psychology from the University of Illinois.

Professor Anderson explained the meaning of academic vocabulary and its importance to children's cognitive development, and summarized the academic vocabulary that students should master based on existing research. Professor Anderson then introduced a research project at the Children's Reading Research Center of the University of Illinois. In this project, the research team prepared a unit course material on how hunting wolves can affect ecology, economy, and public policy. The researchers used quasi-experimental research methods to compare the difference in academic vocabulary acquisition among fifth-graders who participated in student-led group collaborative learning (Collaborative Group Work) or received teacher-led direct instruction (Direct Instruction) which performed.

During the Q&A session, the participants had an in-depth exchange with Professor Anderson on key issues such as dialogue methods, group differences, student conversation coding methods, and cultural differences.

Forum

In the afternoon, Professor Anderson had a discussion with teachers and students of the Dep and discussed about the recent research project.

The five sub-project leaders gave a report on the research content, implementation plan, and inter-project relevance of each sub-project, and explained how to conduct research on core literacy assessment and training mechanisms in complex learning situations.

Professor Anderson listened carefully to the reports, discussed the relevance and practicality of the projects with the sub-projects leaders. He gave valuable suggestions on how to construct a core literacy theoretical framework based on empirical research .