The inspection of mistakes can play a powerful role in an individual's learning process (Boaler 2015). The purpose of this article is to support the reader in selecting mistakes that can be leveraged to benefit the learning of all students. Specifically, the authors focus on "which" and "why": "which" mistakes to…

This article describes a teacher-research project in which a class of fifth-grade English language learners demonstrated that learning about photography and using it as inspiration for their creative writing authenticated their writing task, helped them bring their outside-school worlds inside school, increased their enthusiasm for writing, and…

In this article, the authors provide an overview of engineering and the engineering design process, and describe the steps they took to develop a fifth grade-level, standards-based engineering design task titled "Getting the Dirt on Decomposition." Their main goal was to focus more on modeling the discrete steps they took to create and…

In this article, we highlight the need for a precisely defined construct in score-based validation and discuss the contribution of cognitive theories to accurately and comprehensively defining the construct. We propose a framework for integrating cognitively based theoretical and empirical evidence to specify and evaluate the construct. We apply…

This article presents a descriptive account of an after-school study. The participants--Allan (male, ten years), Veronique (female, nine years), and William (male, ten years)--all spoke English as their first language and were considered by their classroom teachers to be meeting the provincially set expectations for the fifth-grade curriculum…

In this paper, difficulties of students in the case of computer-mediated teaching of geometry in a traditional classroom are considered within the framework of "transactional distance", a concept well known in distance education. The main interest of this paper is to record and describe in detail the different forms of…

Vicki Zack, a classroom teacher and researcher, returned to the fifth grade classroom in 1989 after more than a decade of teaching in a university faculty of education in order to teach in the changing ecologies of classrooms (with problem-solving approaches in mathematics and literature-based approaches in reading) and to research from the…

In part 1 of this article Zack and Reid offered two examples of students operating with good-enough understandings in mathematics, and related their understandings to features of good-enough understanding identified by Mackey (I997) in the context of reading. Mackey contends that the ability to read further, on the basis of a very imperfect…