The purpose of this study was to understand faculty perspectives of institutional change. The context for the institutional change was a shift from a largely traditional student population with a focus on the liberal arts to a range of adult and non-traditional students seeking professional degrees. The three research questions which guided the…

Despite large investments of human and financial resources in college student success, the 6-year graduation rate for US public universities remains at approximately 60% (NCES, 2018). In an effort to understand faculty roles in mitigating and exacerbating student learning, we interviewed 50 students from two public universities in the US Mid-west…

Instructors teaching an Indigenous education course face the challenges of shifting students' understanding and inviting them into the work of decolonizing education. Indigenous instructors take on the embodied and emotional work of highlighting diverse representations of Indigenous peoples, histories, and perspectives in scholarship in order to…

Teacher expectations and judgments about student capabilities are predictive of student achievement, yet such judgments may be influenced by salient dimensions of student identity and invite biases. Moreover, ambitious math teaching may also invite teacher biases due to the emphasis on student-generated inputs and ideas. In this pre-registered…

Background: Video lectures which include the teachers' presence have become increasingly common. As teacher enthusiasm is a nonverbal cue in video lectures, more and more studies are focusing on this topic. However, little research has been carried out on the interactions between teacher enthusiasm and prior knowledge when learning from video…

Response to Intervention provides a continuum of instruction across intensity levels through multitiered intervention models. A lot of work to date has been devoted to how to configure tiers to ensure the appropriate increases in intensity. Much less work has been devoted to making adjustments "within" tiers to attempt to forestall the need for…

Students' opportunities to learn how to think are embedded in the instructional tasks with which they are invited to engage in the classroom. Prior research has revealed that the selection and use of cognitively demanding tasks does not guarantee high-level student thinking during their enactment. To address this challenge, we designed and…

This 3-year qualitative study examined how 26 teachers in four U.S. secondary schools addressed the literacy demands of curriculum materials based on standards from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. It was grounded in sociocultural perspectives that encourage study of language in local contexts, including classrooms, communities,…

Asking surface-level questions is a common practice among educators. Delva Daines's (1986) pilot study indicated that 93 percent of the questions asked during lessons were at the literal level of comprehension and that it was very common for the teachers to restate, rephrase, or answer their own questions before the student had an opportunity to…

To determine whether consensus existed among teachers about the complexity of common classroom materials, a survey was administered to 66 pre-service and in-service kindergarten and prekindergarten teachers. Participants were asked to rate 14 common classroom materials as simple, complex, or super-complex. Simple materials have one obvious part,…

The relative apparent difficulty of physics concepts at the grade 11 and 12 level was examined using a questionnaire survey addressed to all physics teachers within the providence of British Columbia. The physics courses were described using 22 concepts to cover the Physics 11 course and 30 concepts to cover the Physics 12 course. Subjects were…

The study of 21 teacher-child dyads showed that teachers of children (aged 2-8) with severe handicaps adjusted the complexity of their linguistic requests based on the child's communication level and modulated their requests based on children's responses. Teachers' adjustment of language structure was not as closely attuned to children's…

Describes how a measure of problem difficulty (problem complexity) can be developed. Explores factors that may affect the difficulty of mathematics problems by focusing on ninth-grade student test responses (n=125), mathematics teacher questionnaire responses (n=29) in Hong Kong (China), and using a computer. Identifies four problem difficulty…

Questionnaires were sent to biology, chemistry, physics, and earth science teachers (N=100) to determine practical problems at the student/teacher/subject matter interface. Responses related to importance of content area for students and difficulty students have in learning the content are discussed. (SK)

Degree of lesson complexity was examined and related to the type of approach used by eighth grade teachers. Results indicated that teachers adapt to the perceived complexity of class activities and to students' behavior cues, using direct instruction more frequently in mathematics and science than in the humanities and language arts. (Author/PP)