Public education reforms that attempt to more accurately determine the impact of individual teachers on student learning outcomes have resulted in recent changes to educator evaluation systems. In Massachusetts, teachers are evaluated according to their performance on the standards of effective teaching and their progress on student learning and…

Engineering design places unique demands on teachers, as students are coming up with new, unanticipated ideas to problems along often unpredictable trajectories. These demands motivate a responsive approach to teaching, in which teachers attend their students' thinking and flexibly adapt their instructional plans and objectives. A great deal of…

Background/Context: Many urban schools today look to instructional teams as a means to decrease professional isolation, promote teachers' ongoing development, and substantially reduce well-documented variation in teachers' effectiveness across classrooms. Recent research finds that teams can contribute to teachers' development and increased…

Informal learning and how individuals learn in the workplace have gained increasing attention by researchers in recent years. In relation to other learning activities, informal learning constitutes a substantial part of an adult's life. This paper explores the informal workplace learning experiences of graduate student employees. Data was…

This paper examines preservice teachers negotiating and making sense of a particular policy, the Massachusetts' Rethinking Equity and Teaching for English Language Learners (RETELL). It addresses the following questions: First, what do preservice teachers know about policy in general and the RETELL language policy in particular? Second, how do…

The use of data to track and manage progress is critical to a collective impact initiative achieving results or understanding impact. Yet, little research has been done to determine how collective impact practitioners can effectively use data. This article--including a literature review, semistructured interviews with experts on performance…

Assessment plays a central role in evaluating and strengthening student learning in higher education, and sociology departments, in particular, have increasingly become interested in engaging in assessment activities to better understand students' learning. This qualitative study builds on previous research on assessment by asking what students in…

This mixed-methods study examines how teachers who have taught one or two units of the Engineering is Elementary (EiE) curriculum for two years reported on: students' responses to design failure; the ways in which they, the teachers, supported these students and used fail words (e.g. fail, failure); and the teachers' broad perspectives and…

The purpose of this basic qualitative study was to identify and understand the leadership strategies used by Massachusetts high school administrators during the early implementation (first four years) of one-to-one computing. The study was guided by two research questions: (1) How do high school administrators describe their experience leading the…

Two longitudinal studies examined the effects of explicit intention, as described in Ajzen's (1991) theory of planned behavior, on preschool teachers' success in enrolling in college. In the first study, 88 low-wage female teachers and teachers' aides who represented 85 child care centers were surveyed about their intentions to pursue college…

This article, based on qualitative interviews conducted between 2007-2008 with 12 middle-career educators in the greater Boston area in Massachusetts, details teachers' career and leadership aspirations in a context of educational change. The findings suggest that teachers who presently are in midcareer struggle with the move toward the…

This qualitative study illustrates how complex perceptions of identity influence the community college experience for student veterans who have been in combat, creating barriers to their overall persistence. The collective experiences of student combat veterans at two community colleges in northwestern Massachusetts are presented, and a Combat…

Education abroad programs are becoming more common as a mechanism for developing the global competencies of engineering graduates. An increasing body of research shows that intercultural learning does not occur "de facto" in such programs. This study used quantitative and qualitative methods to explore changes in students' intercultural…

For young men, the transition to adulthood may be a time of heightened adherence to traditional gender roles and norms of masculinity. However, recent research with young men in gender-specific contexts has indicated that some contexts support a construction of masculinity that is more inclusive. Through a theoretical thematic analysis of…

In this paper we present data from one-on-one interviews conducted with students who have taken intermediate and advanced inquiry-based mathematics courses in a program that prepares future preK-8 teachers. Many of these students entered college with a fear of math, but then gained confidence from a required introductory math course and chose to…