Now in its sixth year of implementation, the TECHFIT approach involves having individuals and teams of middle school teachers successfully complete a week-long, professional development (PD) workshop through which they acquire the essential skills that contribute to the task of innovating an exergame. An exergame is a technology-supported fitness…

Expansive Framing (EF) is a theory and an instructional technique to facilitate connections between content and contexts. We employed EF as an approach to create a series of integrated mathematics and computer science (CS) lessons, using digital technology as a tool to leverage shared mathematical and computational ideas. We used deductive…

In this paper, we describe the design, development, and implementation of a curriculum based on teaching computer science using an industry-standard game-design software: Unity 3D. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings of our instructional design process and steps we have taken to introduce complexity and maintain student motivation. We discuss…

Learning to teach is a culturally situated activity. As teachers learn, it is important to understand not only what teachers learn, but how they learn. This article describes a qualitative case study of a subset of four teachers' learning during a professional development surrounding a plate tectonics curriculum. Using qualitative methods, this…

This study examined the validity of data collected from a novel online story retell task. The task was specifically designed for use by junior school teachers with the support of speech-language therapists or literacy specialists. The assessment task was developed to monitor children's oral language progress in their first year at school as part…

This article reports on professional development in which twenty-four middle- or high-school teachers learned about integration of the Geographic Information System (GIS) in science or social science classes. We analyzed qualitative data obtained from the participants to examine two research questions. 1) What were the most relevant and useful…

The ability to code computer programs is considered an important part of literacy in today's society. This paper reports from a case study in two sixth-grade classes where Scratch coding was part of six mathematics lessons. The aim of the study was to investigate how Scratch coding affected students' interest development in coding and in…

Background: This study considers the moment-bymoment mathematics discourse of teachers and students and the relationship of these discourses to student learning. I focus on the discursive constructs of responsiveness to students' mathematical thinking and the intellectual work in teacher and student discourse. Responsiveness to students'…

This paper describes a 54-hour summer institute for grades 6-12 mathematics and science teachers (N = 19) with a comprehensive approach to preparing teachers to use computational thinking (CT) in their classrooms, including training in Python computer programming with Lego® Mindstorms® robotics, mathematics content sessions, and opportunities to…

This study aims at investigating the effects of Programming Education Planned with TPACK (Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge) Framework on middle school students' learning outputs within the ITS (Informational Technology and Software) course. Although TPACK is known as a teacher training program, this study demonstrates it can be used in…

Computing education in schools faces several problems, such as a lack of computing teachers and time in an already overloaded curriculum. A solution can be a multidisciplinary approach, integrating the teaching of computing within other subjects, creating the need to motivate teachers from other disciplines to teach computing in middle school.…

The aim of this study was to explore the degree to which a professional development (PD) program designed using GeoGebra influences a group of Turkish middle school teachers' beliefs in relation to mathematics and role of GeoGebra in mathematics education. In order to collect the required data, the PD course was established to provide six teachers…

The purpose of this dissertation is to describe and understand how teachers describe the changes in their practices as a result of ten years participation in a one-to-one environment. This research study focuses on one successful middle school's adoption of laptops to support teaching and learning. A qualitative study using interviews of key…

This article draws on a longitudinal study generated by a school and university-based partnership and funded by an Improving Teacher Quality grant. This study uses Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Cole, 1996; Engeström & Miettinen, 1999; Wertsch, 1991) and social semiotic theories of multimodality (Jewitt, 2006; Kress, 2010) to examine how…

Blended learning has been touted to have substantial benefits for both teachers and learners. Enacting blended instruction with students provides data and other information sources to support teacher reflection. However, reflective accounts from practicing teachers in these blended environments are missing from research literature. With these…