In a successful middle school, school counselors support young adolescents' academic progress and personal wellbeing through a variety of methods. Classroom instruction, or classroom guidance, offers one method of providing such support and features the benefit of allowing middle grades school counselors to reach all students in their schools.…

For teachers to provide students with meaningful instruction in area measurement, teachers need robust understandings of area. Here, I describe two cycles of a "lesson experiment" used to investigate prospective teachers' understandings of area units in an undergraduate mathematics class. For each cycle, I collected and analyzed the…

Games have been used as instructional tools throughout history. Educational experiences are more effective when learners are active participants, and when teachers carefully choose fun games with appropriate game mechanics and clear curricular connections, students can engage in rigorous mental processes. At the same time, students may learn a…

Parents want to work with their children's teachers to help them succeed in school. "What Brain Research Says about Student Learning" provides parents and teachers the most recent findings in brain research and learning theory in a very approachable way. The reader will see how the child's brain develops, learns, remembers, and creates…

This paper outlines a seven-step process for developing problem-solving tasks informed by cognitive load theory. Through an example of a task developed for Year 2 students, we show how this approach can be used to produce challenging mathematical tasks that aim to optimise cognitive load for each student.

All students should be provided with opportunities to develop conceptual understanding prior to procedural fluency. To develop students' conceptual understanding, teachers must learn such skills as how to select, plan, and enact cognitively demanding tasks (CDT) and to evaluate evidence of student learning. Therefore, teachers need opportunities…

Digital systems and digital technologies are globally investigated for their potential to transform learning, teaching and assessment towards offering unique learning experiences to the twenty-first century learners. This Special Issue on "Digital systems supporting cognition and exploratory learning in twenty-first century" aims to…

Both local and global issues are typically dealt with in the Social Studies curriculum, or in curriculum areas with other names but similar intents. In the literature about Social Studies the imagination has played little role, and consequently it hardly appears in texts designed to help teachers plan and implement Social Studies lessons. What is…

Current technologies incorporating sophisticated mathematical analysis software (calculation, graphing, dynamic geometry, tables, and more) provide easy access to multiple representations of mathematical problems. Realising the affordances of such technology for students' learning requires carefully designed lessons. This paper reports on design…

To teach the rigorous skills and knowledge students need to succeed in future college-entry courses and workforce training programs, education stakeholders have increasingly called for more rigorous curricula, instruction, and assessments. Identifying the critical attributes of rigor and measuring its appearance in curricular materials is…

This article presents a lesson plan in which students learn about water in solid, liquid, and gaseous phases through trade books, demonstrations, and artwork. The author illustrates the stages of the lesson plan in the sequence they were conducted in the classroom with a group of students in grades one and two. Each stage targets specific learning…

Physical education is a prime content area for interdisciplinary learning. The movement components of physical education can be used as a medium through which children are provided with opportunities to practice and strengthen language skills. Cone, Werner, Cone, and Woods (1998, p. 4) agree: "interdisciplinary learning is an educational process…

NIER (National Institute of Educational Research, 2004) survey revealed that the most common attitude of Japanese high school students to mathematics is that "it is not useful in daily life but must be learnt for entrance examinations". It was also clarified that only 3.2 percent of mathematics teachers use computers in their classes.…

This paper describes the Foresee Approach, a recently developed model for integrating content, language, and learning strategies instruction in the English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) or part ESL classroom. The Foresee model is an extension of Chamot and O'Malley's Cognitive Academic Language Learning Approach (CALLA), resembling the latter in…

The information processing of teaching was investigated in a case study, comparing the behavior and cognition of ten elementary school teachers. Data indicated that the amount of discrepancy between teaching plan and classroom reality was a critical variable in the information processing of teachers. (JKS)