This mixed methods study endeavored to examine the close reading knowledge, perceptions, and practices of high school teachers of English/language arts in the United States. Through a quantitative online survey, and two qualitative approaches--one-on-one interviews and reflective instructional logs--data was collected regarding how teachers felt…

Learning by example is nothing new to the education landscape. Research into think-aloud protocols, though often used as a form of assessment rather than instruction, provided practical, content-specific literacy strategies for crafting the instructional intervention in this study. Additionally, research into worked examples--from the earliest…

Despite the effectiveness of dialogic instruction and whole-class discussion, it does not happen with regularity in the English Language Arts classroom. To examine this discrepancy, this study focused on the beliefs of teachers as they thought about discussion. To this end, the question addressed in this study was: How do high school English…

This multiple case study investigated how the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for writing and teacher evaluation system based in part on CCSS assessments might be influencing writing instruction in elementary schools. The sample included nine schools: Six achieved above-predicted performance on English Language Arts (ELA) as well as prior ELA…

This article reports results from a study of teacher beliefs among a panel of English and language arts teachers at three universities as the pre-service teachers entered methodological coursework and internships. Using a new assessment tool, the Developmental Instruction Assessment Battery (DIAB), along with a discrete choice task and one-on-one…

Students, educators, and schools across the country have been presented with challenges as a result of rigorous standards and high-complexity tests. The problem addressed in this case study was that teachers in a rural middle school in a southeastern state were preparing students to take a new high-stakes state-mandated assessment in English…

Studies have examined the assumption that teachers have previous perceptions, beliefs and knowledge about learning (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015). This study presented the In-Action Mental Model of twenty leading artist-teachers while teaching Visual Arts in three Israeli art institutions of higher Education. Data was collected in two…

The purpose of this study was to: (1) describe elementary teachers' perceptions on their preparedness to implement the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards (ELA-CCSS); (2) determine how perceptions influenced changes in instructional practices; and (3) to explore ELA-CCSS implementation challenges and/or barriers in supporting teacher…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how US school leaders and teachers make sense of multiple accountability policies, including the Common Core State Standards and teacher evaluation, and how this process relates to school priorities and classroom practice. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses a comparative case study…

Social media are becoming a critical part of communication in everyday lives and are a common form of communication for many students in and outside of school. Accordingly, English learner (EL) students are using social media-based communication to gather information, maintain friendships, and express multiple identities. Considering that social…

This comparative case study, framed by Cultural Historical Activity Theory and sociocultural understandings of literacy, investigated students' online literate activity in two eighth grade English Language Arts classes taught by the same teacher--one with a scripted literacy curriculum and the other without. During a year-long research project, we…

This qualitative study examined in-service teachers who were enrolled in a graduate level course that focused on new literacies and the integration of technology with literacy. They also taught children enrolled in a summer writing camp as part of the course. The authors followed the teachers into their classrooms once the graduate course ended to…

This experimental study examined how the reading and writing development of sixth-grade L2 students was affected by syntactic enhancement. Visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) technology, which visualizes syntactic structures, was used to convert a textbook to the one with syntactic enhancement. The sample (n = 282), which was drawn from a…

This study investigates the learning reported by a set of volunteer participants from three university teacher education programs: from one Southwestern U.S. University, the program in secondary English/Language Arts Education and the program in Elementary Education; and from one Southeastern U.S. University, the program in secondary…

While social media is widely used by youth around the world, research is only beginning to document how transnational students employ these technologies. This study investigated how English-learning adolescents in the United States use social media to engage in social, academic, and identity work. Data were collected during a four-day social media…