Universities across the United States are grappling with both funding and enrollment pressures and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Decreasing state funding coupled with lower birth rates of the recent past (Grawe, 2018) are forcing colleges and universities to rethink enrollment and retention strategies. Amid the push to…

We propose a theory of education curricula as horizontally differentiated by their paces. The pace of a curriculum and the preparedness of a student jointly determine the match quality of the curriculum for this student, so different students derive different benefits from learning under the same curriculum. Furthermore, a change in the curricular…

Teachers and administrators must embrace the paradigm shift that has occurred with regards to student engagement, and expectation of teachers. The roles of both the student and the teacher have shifted. Because of increased student access to information, the teacher is becoming a facilitator who prepares the classroom for exploration and…

On college campuses throughout the United States, classes for decades have been offered to help Spanish speakers learn Portuguese, augmented recently by similar courses in Italian, French, and Catalan. Though there exist numerous commonalities between these innovative course offerings, the pivotal role of Spanish stands out. This essay therefore…

Like instruments used in afterschool programs to assess children's social and emotional growth or to evaluate staff members' performance, instruments used to evaluate program quality should be free from bias. Practitioners and researchers alike want to know that assessment instruments, whatever their type or intent, treat all people fairly and do…

This article synthesizes foundational knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines regarding how humans develop in context. Major constructs that define human development are integrated into a developmental system framework, this includes--epigenetics, neural malleability and plasticity, integrated complex skill development and learning, human…

It is commonly discussed that a key challenge for online collaboration is to promote group awareness. Although this challenge has gained intensified consideration by scholars, scarce attempt has been devoted into development of a reasonable hypothetical comprehension of what group awareness really is and how it can be studied empirically. This…

A few years ago we began to revamp our introductory physics course for life science students. We knew that this cohort would be less prepared and less adventurous mathematically than engineering, physical science, or mathematics majors. Moreover, from our own experience and the mathematics education literature, we knew that trigonometry would be…

Recent research on disciplinary literacy has called for a paradigm shift among secondary content teachers from perceiving themselves as disciplinary content transmitters to disciplinary literacy teachers who model and engage students in reading, writing, inquiring, and doing like experts within each discipline. How do content teachers incorporate…

Recent research shows that reading comprehension relies heavily on prior knowledge. Far more than generic "reading skills" like drawing inferences, making predictions, and knowing the function of subheads, how well students learn from a nonfiction text depends on their background knowledge of the text's subject matter. And in a cyclical…

In this article, Kang discusses how she scaffolded a comic book project in a university L2 writing class and argued for its pedagogical value in teaching multimodal argument and fostering critical thinking skills. Although this project was assigned in a specific university L2 writing class, it can be adapted to other types of writing courses and…

In the discourse on diversity in colleges and universities in the United States, an often-neglected population is nontraditional adult learners. This article explores this invisible aspect of undergraduate diversity, and addresses how competence-based education, which focuses on demonstrating the actual ability "to do," is an innovative…

Teachers hope that students will take what they have learned and apply it to other contexts. Teachers also assume that students bring to the classroom, prior learning skills and conceptual understanding that form the foundation of new learning. Educational scholars call this import to and export from different learning experiences "transfer…

Direct experience is a powerful learning and teaching tool. However, when trying to teach students about natural hazards such as earthquakes, direct experience is not the best idea. Depending on location, it might be difficult to help young students understand the impact of natural hazards on their lives. Students will naturally find it…

Researchers suggest that musical training prepares the mind for learning; however, there are many obstacles to the implementation of research to practice in music education. The purpose of this article is to apply key principles of mind brain education to music education and to evaluate how music prepares the mind for learning. Practical teaching…