Climate change is complex, requiring critical thinking on both local and global scales. Its effects vary dramatically around the world and require new strategies to help students grasp its complexity, scale, and interrelatedness. This article describes a project to help biology students think critically about climate change from a global…

Competency-based education (CBE) is widely viewed as an innovative alternative to traditional higher education, yet most programs serve only a narrow slice of the postsecondary population. Few are intended for adults who need to boost basic skills in order to succeed in college coursework. However, if designed with the needs of a broader range of…

Graduate course assignments that are pragmatic, challenging, scaffold prior learning, and support academic career aspirations can be difficult to create and even more problematic to assess for even the most experienced faculty. This paper presents a class assignment that incorporated a real-world journal reviewing assignment into an elective…

Students come to college with skills and knowledge acquired through work, military, and other experiences. Academic credit for prior learning is awarded when a student's prior learning is assessed and found to be the equivalent of specific college course outcomes, and when the award of credit is consistent with the policies of the institution.…

The authors explore ways teachers and school administrators can draw on the prior experiences and diverse language and literacy practices of refugee ELLs to develop culturally and linguistically responsive curriculums that support language learning and overall school success of these students.

The importance of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) professions to America's ability to advance its quality of life have long been a matter of discussion on a national level. The rewards of study in these areas are as evident to those who teach it, as they are, often, difficult for students to appreciate. This article…

A distinguishing feature of all the formative assessment probes in the "Uncovering Student Ideas" series is that each probe has two parts: (1) a selected answer choice that usually mirrors the research on commonly held ideas students have about concepts or phenomena; and (2) an explanation that supports their answer choice. It is this…

Measurement is an important component of K-grade 12 mathematics curricula. The concepts of area and perimeter of polygons are first introduced in third grade and serve as the basis for teaching in the upper grades. Without a strong understanding of measurement, students will struggle to meaningfully grasp three-dimensional measurement concepts…

The American educational landscape is changing rapidly, and so are the students in American mathematics classrooms. In the New York City public schools, one of every four students is an English language learner (ELL) (New York City Department of Education 2014). Mathematics teachers find themselves teaching either in a classroom that contains all…

In "Turnarounds to Transfer," teachers design a collection of tasks toward the summative performance goal but go beyond the Communicative mode criteria: they must assess for transfer. Transfer design criteria must include a complexity or variation that make learners engage critical thinking skills and call upon a repertoire of knowledge…

The early 1980s were disruptive for computing. In many countries, the set of persons who regularly used computing expanded rapidly from a tiny and homogeneous set of data processing professionals to include nearly everyone. The dawn of the "new user" entrained challenges for training and instructional design: the economics of smaller…

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2016), the number of public school students in the United States who were English learners (ELs) was estimated at 4.5 million. However, in 2005, the national standardized testing scores (Fry 2007) show that about 51 percent of eighth-grade EL students were behind other students in reading…

As the ethnic and racial diversity in U.S. classrooms continues to grow, myths about the education of English Language Learners (ELLs) persist, while many teachers feel ill-prepared to meet these students' academic needs. This article focuses on myths shared by in-service science teachers enrolled in a master's program at the University of Texas…

This article discusses ways in which physical educators can enhance learning in their classrooms based on the book How Learning Works: Seven Researched-based Principles for Smart Teaching (2010). Although the research-based principles were proposed for classroom teaching, they are equally applicable to a physical education setting. The article…

Teachers have found that engaging students in justification can help students deepen and retain mathematical knowledge, gain a greater sense of ownership over the material, and improve communication and representation skills (Staples, Bartlo, and Thanheiser 2012). Student engagement in a justification activity can also lead to more equitable…