Photovoice involves respondents taking photographs of their environment to promote critical discussions and reflect on their experiences. Photovoice empowers marginalized communities and serves to reach policymakers. The Arizona Youth Identity Project (AZYIP) used photovoice with an innovative approach in a multisite research design with a large…

Written by the SECEIJ Special Forum editorial team, this Project Report summarizes the interdisciplinary, collaborative, and inspiring research journey and theoretical background leading to the creation of a strategic plan for the 'IKE Alliance for Transforming STEM Education. 'IKE, which stands for Indigenous Knowledges, Encouragements,…

Two consequentially related education policy topics in the United States are kindergarten entry assessments (KEAs) and the growing number of students who are "English learners" (ELs). In this study, I compared the content of, and home language use policies for six state KEAs, all of which were comprised of items from the GOLD®…

An innovative system-building initiative known as the STEM Learning Ecosystems Community of Practice (SLECoP) is transforming U.S. STEM education through cross-sector partnerships between schools, afterschool and summer programs, libraries, museums, and businesses, among others. Although logic models exist to describe how SLEs can make positive…

Effective collaboration between student peers is not spontaneous. A system that can measure collaboration in real-time may be useful, as it could alert an instructor to pairs that need help in collaborating effectively. We tested whether superficial measures of speech and user interface actions would suffice for measuring collaboration. Pairs of…

Stealth assessment has been successfully embedded in educational games to measure students' learning in an unobtrusive and supportive way. This study explored the possibility of applying stealth assessment in a digital reading platform and sought to identify potential in-system indicators of students' digital learning outcomes. Utilizing the user…

In this paper, I utilize complementary features of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to trace and investigate issues of power, materiality, and reproduction embedded within notions of citizenship and civic engagement. I interrogate the often narrow and conservative political and public discourses in Arizona that…

Background: Preschool teacher's instructional practices are one component of high-quality early education classrooms that have the potential to directly influence young children's school readiness and success; therefore, the type and quality of instructional practices used by preschool teachers should be explored. Purpose: The purpose of this…

If your professional learning seems stalled, maybe you could put yourself and your colleagues in the driver's seat of professional development. The authors describe a professional learning approach that gives teachers both a say in what they focus their learning on and a chance to practice and refine teaching strategies that they hope to…

This correlation study examined relationships between special education and standardized testing variables of 100 Arizona secondary school districts with Native American populations, and the archival records for postsecondary outcomes between 2012 and 2014 of students with disabilities, using archival data collected by the Arizona Department of…

Response-to-intervention (RTI) systems posit that Tier 1 consists of high-quality general classroom instruction using evidence-based methods to address the needs of most students. However, data on the extent to which general education teachers provide such instruction are rarely collected. This missing instructional data problem may result in RTI…

Modern data collection in the Earth Sciences has propelled the need for understanding signal processing and time-series analysis techniques. However, there is an educational disconnect in the lack of instruction of time-series analysis techniques in many Earth Science academic departments. Furthermore, there are no platform-independent freeware…

Effectively grouping learners in an online environment is a highly useful task. However, datasets used in this task often have large numbers of attributes of disparate types and different scales, which traditional clustering approaches cannot handle effectively. Here, a unique dissimilarity measure based on the random forest, which handles the…

In order to enhance Extension evaluation efforts it is important to understand current practices. The study reported here researched the evaluation behaviors of county-based Extension professionals. Extension professionals from eight states (n = 1,173) responded to a survey regarding their evaluation data collection, analysis, and reporting…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe challenges and lessons learned in the design and development of a comprehensive, flexible environmental management system (EMS) in a real university setting; also to inform development of similar systems elsewhere and provide a modular, extensible software architecture for such efforts.…