Heightened accountability pressures and an increased emphasis on teaching quality have directed scholarly attention to scrutinizing instruction, particularly with respect to issues of validity and reliability. However, these attempts have largely been directed toward "core" content areas and investigated generic or content-specific…

Religious Studies (RS) is expected to impact students' personal development as well as enabling acquisition of knowledge and understanding of religious and philosophical traditions. But to what extent does this actually occur? As part of a larger quantitative investigation of the effects of A Level RS in students' beliefs, values and worldviews…

Two years after participating in a replication of the Stallings Effective Use of Time (EUOT) Program, ten teachers were re-observed and interviewed to determine the extent to which they had maintained the measured changes in their behavior patterns. Subjects were selected for the follow-up from a 27 EUOT teacher sample based on having exhibited…

Interactive writing is a research-based early literacy strategy that has been found effective at increasing young children's oral language skills, alphabet knowledge, phonemic awareness, concepts of print, and early writing skills. This paper reports on a case study which explored the feasibility and fidelity of implementing interactive writing in…

This study examines teacher discourse strategies used in kindergarten inquiry-based science learning as part of the Scientific Literacy Project (SLP) (Mantzicopoulos, Patrick & Samarapungavan, 2005). Four public kindergarten science classrooms were chosen to implement science teaching strategies using a guided-inquiry approach. Data were…

Teaching and learning speaking skills should be able to engage students in a creative process. Students have to be able to speak in front of the class, create a dialogue, tell a story, and produce the language creatively. The teaching and learning of the speaking skill focusing on story telling ability can work well when supported by the…

This study examined EFL learners' attitudes and motivation towards learning English through content-based instruction (CBI) at a university in Thailand. Seventy-one (71) university students, the majority sophomores, answered a 6-point Likert scale questionnaire on attitudes and motivation together with six open-ended questions regarding learning…

Inservice teachers, participants in a prior study on mathematics anxiety, were revisited to determine whether their levels of mathematics anxiety still existed and/or continued to change after 5 years teaching experience. A 98-item Likert-type survey, informal discussions, informal interviews, and questionnaire-guided narrative interviews were…

Non-Chinese-speaking (NCS) South Asian students, as ethnic minority group in Hong Kong, are the main disadvantaged social cohort in Chinese language learning. It has been a challenge for L1 Chinese teachers to conduct L2 Chinese teaching to NCS students with diversified native languages and socio-cultural backgrounds. "Reading to Learn,…

The flow experience can be an important precursor to high levels of creativity and innovation. Prior work has identified and conceptualized the key elements of the flow experience in cocreative activities as individual flow corridor, individual flow feeling, and group flow. Surprisingly, the flow experience is underrepresented in theory and…

There are great opportunities and challenges to sharing large-scale mathematics classroom observation data. This Research Commentary describes the methodological opportunities and challenges and provides a specific example from a mathematics education research project to illustrate how the research questions and framework drove observational…

When faced with child-related challenges associated with autism spectrum disorder, positive and negative social exchanges may be critical to parents' psychological well-being. This study examined the types and sources of positive and negative social exchanges reported by mothers and fathers of children with autism spectrum disorder and their…

This study investigated whether children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and typically developing children matched on receptive language share resources fairly and reciprocally. Children completed age-appropriate versions of the Ultimatum and Dictator Games with real stickers and an interactive partner. Both groups offered similar numbers of…

The study investigates direct and indirect preschool quality effects on emergent literacy skills (children's letter knowledge, oral skills, and interests and skills in print and communication) using quality indicators at process (ECERS-R, ECERS-E), structure (e.g. class size) and belief (e.g. support creativity) level. The study included a sample…

Virtual globe programs such as Google Earth replicate real-world experiential learning of spatial and geographic concepts by allowing students to navigate across our planet without ever leaving campus. However, empirical evidence for the learning value of these technological tools and the experience students gain by exploration assignments framed…