This team of authors collaborated to transform a middle school-focused informal STEM learning experience to a virtual platform that engaged students in authentic STEM learning experiences while simultaneously promoting discourse.

This study explored the impact of "Argumentation-driven inquiry" (ADI) on primary school students' argumentation performance in a blended synchronous learning environment (BSLE). A total of 159 fifth-grade primary school students (79 from an urban school and 80 from a rural school) participated in this quasi-experimental study. Students…

Background: Amidst the increasing application of online education in the post-COVID era, new challenges in student engagement have emerged. However, most studies on online engagement have adopted macro-level approaches and relied on self-report measures of retrospective engagement. Few have examined micro-level engagement in terms of real-time and…

This non-experimental correlational quantitative research study was conducted to examine the relationship between the percentage of voluntary live synchronous virtual lesson attendance (LVLA) and the reading comprehension skill growth of sixth through eighth-grade English Language Arts (ELA) students enrolled in a Pennsylvania full-time online…

The COVID-19 pandemic affected schools worldwide. When schools shut down, teachers and students had no choice but to go to remote learning. A school in a rural setting participated in blended learning where students did a combination of asynchronous and synchronous learning. The subject of this study was two sixth grade groups of students with the…

The purpose of this study was to assess the feasibility and implementation of a text message intervention to teach adolescents bystander intervention strategies. Adolescents (N = 123) engaged daily for 15 days with bystander education materials and questions sent to them by text message to their personal cell phones. The likelihood to intervene on…

College planning has transformed into a complex digital dance, where Instagram stories matter as much as campus tours and AI chatbots answer midnight questions about application deadlines. Colleges and universities need to be aligned with the expectations of today's college-bound high school students in order to engage them where they are in their…

In cyber charter schools, middle-school students face many barriers to developing STEM identity. My theory of improvement was to address sense of belonging in a large virtual classroom to develop STEM identity in my students. By utilizing diverse STEM role models that reflected my students' racial or ethnic identities and an inquiry-based approach…

Purpose: This study developed an online lesson study, investigated teacher professionalism after following an online lesson study and examined students' environmental literacy. Design/methodology/approach: This study used a mixed-method research design. The qualitative approach entailed observing science learning focussing on environmental issues…

Blended synchronous learning has diffused widely owing to its flexibility and accessibility. One of the special forms--blended synchronous classroom program (BSCP) for equitable education has fruited in some countries and areas. An in-depth understanding of the adoption and diffusion of an innovation is beneficial to a wider range of innovation.…

Collaborative learning environments that support students' problem solving have been shown to promote better decision-making, greater academic achievement, and more reasonable argumentation about controversial issues. In this research, we developed a technology-based critical discussion platform to support middle school students' argumentation,…

In March 2020, 90% of schools shut down due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Many schools responded by quickly moving classes online into a period of what has been called emergency remote learning (ERL). The problem addressed in this research study is the lack of engagement among middle-school students due to the home environment during emergency remote…

Background: The Progress in International Reading Literacy Study of 2016 lays claim to the need for critical thinking to be developed since, in the South African context, 78% of learners could not even retrieve explicitly stated information (lower-order thinking) from texts, as opposed to 4% in the rest of the world. Critical, higher-order…

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teaching has moved overnight from a traditional classroom setting to a virtual setting. This has been a great challenge for students, and especially for teachers. Most teachers have not had a lot of experience teaching in a virtual setting. In the course of only a few days, teachers were forced to fully devise and…

Many educational interventions encourage parents to engage in their child's education as if parental time and attention is limitless. Sadly, though, it is not. Successfully encouraging certain parental investments may crowd out other productive behaviors. A randomized field experiment (N = 2,212) assessed the impact of an intervention in which…