This qualitative study examines the perspectives of K-12 school principals in urban settings on the strengths and weaknesses of various professional development program modalities. The research involved interviews with 10 urban K-12 school administrators to explore their views on in-person, online synchronous, and online asynchronous professional…

The State of Nevada launched the "Nevada SafeVoice" anonymous tip line to prevent harmful events in schools and to promote student safety, health, and wellbeing. We assessed the extent to which "SafeVoice" contributed to reductions in school discipline incidents, youth suicides, and increases in the positive school climate.…

This paper analyzes interviews with 27 K-12 distance/online learning experts conducted during the early COVID-19 pandemic, as schools rapidly transitioned to emergency remote instruction. Short video interviews gathered insights from veteran online teachers, school leaders, officials, and scholars on effective remote practices and supporting home…

This design case describes an online synchronous teacher training on computational thinking (CT) skills for a community of practice (CoP) of in-service teachers in India. The training used gamification, reflection, and localization as instructional strategies. The purpose of this training was to help in-service K-12 teachers identify…

Teachers who lack the professional development needed demonstrate less self-efficacy. Teacher pedagogical and content understanding are important factors related to the impact on student engagement and achievement. This study was designed to attempt to understand teachers' perceptions of the impact of professional development and which format…

Despite increased interest in synchronous remote K-12 education, there is limited research on how students perceive such education. This article explores student perceptions of remote education, tutor support, social presence, learning and satisfaction. We developed a survey, and after distributing it and analyzing the results, the survey was…

This scoping review summarizes studies on passive participation in collaborative online learning activities that used computer-mediated communication tools in school settings. A total of 42 articles spanning about 20 years were explored. ERIC and three main journal indexes from Web of Science were used to locate articles. For each year searched,…

Context: Almost 4 million elementary school students were chronically absent, missing 10 percent of more of school days, during the 2015-2016 school year. Missing this much school in early grades is linked with lower reading and math achievement by Grade 3 and higher absenteeism in middle and high school. In addition, chronically absent students…

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated an abrupt transition to virtual learning environments. Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) was adopted by many educational institutions to maintain instructional continuity. This study aimed to explore the perceptions of teachers and students regarding the teaching efficacy of MS Teams, focusing on various educational…

How does live instruction relate to student engagement in distance learning? Does the relationship differ across grade levels? This study addresses these questions by examining data from a random sample of families from a large urban school district in southern California. We find a strong correlation between live instruction and student…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, for a full academic year, Zoom rooms became classrooms for synchronous online learning at schools and universities across the world. This shift in learning space required instructors to adopt new patterns of instructional communication. Grounded in research in instructional proxemics and learning spaces, this study…

Teachers perceive student engagement in many ways, and do not necessarily align engagement strategies they employ with their own conceptualization of this construct. This situation is worsened in online learning of which popularity has grown since the emergence of the COVID-19 global pandemic. We explored perceptions of student engagement in…

With current state-of-the-art advances in artificial intelligence (AI), especially large language models, such as Google's Gemini, Microsoft's Copilot, and ChatGPT, among others, a plethora of research on this phenomenon has been conducted worldwide aiming to examine its limitations, benefits and ethical implications. Nonetheless, such a…

The purpose of this instrumental case study was to examine preservice music educators' perceptions of teaching voice lessons to elementary and secondary students during an online synchronous fieldwork experience. I used Garrison et al.'s Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework to analyze the participants' perceptions of cognitive presence (i.e.,…

Hundreds of thousands of K-12 children in the United States are enrolled in online K-12 virtual schools that consistently report poor academic outcomes. There is a need to assess how well instructors in a synchronous online environment present new material to learners in a way that best aligns with how the brain manages and integrates new…