The demographic statistics for gifted programs in the United States (U.S.) reveal consistent underrepresentation for students from Cultural, Linguistic and Economically Diverse (CLED) subgroups. Despite the priority placed on addressing this imbalance through policy, funding and research, significant improvements have yet to be seen in the U.S.…

Active learning pedagogies offer opportunities to increase student engagement and interest in plants. The Mystery Plant Project is a hands-on, semester-long active learning pedagogy I developed for an introductory, undergraduate Plant Biology course. Students investigate various aspects of their mystery plant species using observations, and…

Biology education worldwide at different levels involves learning to identify plants and animals in nature. The aim of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of a teaching and learning method for bird identification that combines active outdoor fieldwork with active online learning, testing the validity of our instrument. Altogether, 798…

Real Engagement in Active Problem Solving (REAPS) is an evidence-based model for building on and extending the characteristics of gifted learners, enabling them to develop their exceptional talents. The purposes of this study were to (a) identify teachers who implemented the method at a high level of fidelity and (b) describe their ways of…

Technology-enhanced peer feedback (TEPF) activity has been increasingly investigated in L2 writing education. Researchers have conducted many review and meta-analysis studies on related research and identified factors influencing the activity effectiveness. However, few reviews have been conducted based on the activity theory that may clarify…

This essay extends arguments made by Gray-Rosendale in two earlier essays published within the Journal of Basic Writing (1999 and 2006), ones that focused on how basic writers' identities were being constructed in our scholarship. She traced developments in various approaches--developmentalist and grammar-based models (1970s), academic discourse…

Background/Context: The problems that school district leaders identify and how they frame them have consequences--for both policy implementation and the ways that teachers respond. Although that is likely true in all community contexts (from rural to urban, inside and outside metropolitan centers), the influence of broader discourses associated…

Using a natural language processing tool, this study examined participant discourse in personalized learning schools to better understand what personalized learning looks like in practice. Term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) was used to identify the significant words and potential emergent themes for 134 interview transcripts. This…

Mentoring is the act of guiding another person, and developing under the guidance of a mentor, as a mentee, is a common method for aspiring coaches to learn how to coach. An established and effective coach will frequently state that the best learning experiences as a coach occurred under the supervision of a mentor. The beginning of a…

This article explores the learning context for talent development in public schools. Total aspects of the environment from physical space, affective elements, and pedagogical approaches affect learning. How teachers believe and perceive their roles as teachers influence instructional design and decision making. In this article, the optimal…

Knowledge of species, interest in nature, and nature experiences are the factors that best promote interest in and understanding of environmental issues, biodiversity and sustainable life. The aim of this study is to investigate how well student teachers identify common local species, their interest in and ideas about species identification, and…

As the use of project-based learning becomes more frequent in the K-12 science classroom, and in chemistry classrooms in particular, teachers have begun to identify practical questions about implementation that should be addressed empirically. One such question concerns whether there is an ideal group size that fosters individual student…

This study investigated how student participation in an authentic scientific investigation may shape underrepresented students' views of science and support students in learning science. The research centered on the instructional approach used in a fifth-grade classroom to engage English language learning students from Latino backgrounds in a…

Professional development has been a focus of public education since World War II, yet, it was not until the passage of the Goals 2000: Educate America Act in 1994 that professional development became federally mandated. The infusion of educational technology at the start of Goals 2000 created a natural connection with professional development. In…

Experts have a remarkable capability of locating, perceptually organizing, identifying, and categorizing objects in images specific to their domains of expertise. Eliciting and representing their visual strategies and some aspects of domain knowledge will benefit a wide range of studies and applications. For example, image understanding may be…