The objective of this research was to explore design thinking among teams of high school students. This objective is encompassed in the research question driving this inquiry: How do teams of high school students allocate time across stages of design? Design thinking on the professional level typically occurs in a team environment. Many…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the decisions three teachers made to integrate technology in technology-rich elementary classrooms. An additional purpose of this study was to understand how the teachers' beliefs about technology and their knowledge of content, pedagogy, technology, and learners influenced the decisions…

This article synthesizes findings from an on-going line of inquiry investigating the potential of educatively scaffolded digital resources to help teachers understand and implement a complex model of history instruction, problem-based historical inquiry. The digital resources developed for this inquiry provided teachers with wise-practice…

The Lawrence Hall of Science, a science center, seeks to replicate real-world engineering at the "Ingenuity in Action" exhibit, which consists of three open-ended challenges. These problems encourage children to engage in engineering design processes and problem-solving techniques through tinkering. We observed and interviewed 112…

The problem-solving strategies of students enrolled in general chemistry courses have been the subject of numerous research investigations. In most cases, the investigators were interested in the specific areas or concepts that posed the greatest difficulty to a student's success in achieving the correct answer. However, the investigation reported…

This pilot study is to examine whether it is valuable to implement jazz choral practice in Hong Kong primary school setting. The findings can serve as a reference to explore the possibilities of promoting jazz education in Asian countries or in China. The participants were 70 public primary school students from grade 2 to 5 in Hong Kong. All…

The increasing availability of recording technologies makes it easier to include usability testing projects in business communication courses. Usability testing is a method of discovering whether people can navigate, read, and understand a print or electronic communication well enough to achieve a particular purpose in a reasonable time frame.…

This book presents a novel approach to discussing how to research language teacher cognition and practice. An introductory chapter by the editors and an overview of the research field by Simon Borg precede eight case studies written by new researchers, each of which focuses on one approach to collecting data. These approaches range from…

This paper reports on the findings of a pilot school-based professional development programme for Tanzanian primary school teachers launched in February 2011 and evaluated in December 2012 by the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training with the support of UNICEF. The study set out to investigate the effectiveness and efficiency of the pilot…

Shared reading is a common practice in preschool classrooms and is purported to develop oral language, print concepts, and listening comprehension. The actual practice of reading aloud differed greatly among observed classrooms resulting in variations in potential positive effects. This study examines the potential effects of professional…

A pedagogic conversational agent (PCA) can be defined as a computer system that interacts with the student in natural language assuming the role of the instructor, a student or a companion. It can have a personality and can generate different sentences according to the agent or the student mood. Empathy with the students' feelings seems to…

The purpose of this study was to examine how and why elementary teachers select books for the read-aloud. A phenomenological approach was used to conduct a fourteen week descriptive study. Three participants were purposefully selected to provide an in-depth examination of teachers' book selection processes. Data was collected through observations,…

The article reports and discusses a long-term qualitative study of forty 8-10-year-old students who regularly played a math game during math lessons for 9 weeks. The goal was to explore the relations between (i) some of the "pedagogical principles" that underlie the game and (ii) the "playing practice" in terms of what actually takes place when…

This qualitative study explores a cohort professional development experience that brought new teachers together every few weeks from across an urban school district. Observation data were analyzed through Wenger's (1998) "Communities of Practice" social learning framework. The purpose was to examine how a cohort can be a valuable resource of new…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of manipulating toy sets on the social verbal interaction that occurs between preschool-age children with disabilities and their typically developing peers. A single-subject alternating-treatments design was used to evaluate the effects of manipulating social toy sets and isolate toy sets on…