Energy concepts are taught in many schools, but children rarely have an opportunity to grapple with energy problems and work on their own solutions. This study explores the impacts of Connect Science, a service-learning (SL) program developed to enhance elementary students' energy literacy in the United States. Program impacts were explored within…

Inquiry is the essence of social studies, and inquiry "looping" in social studies curricula means offering students opportunities to engage in inquiry in regular intervals and in a coherent fashion within and across grade levels. This can benefit the youngest students since they are filled with hope and want to make a difference in the…

An important part of promoting scientific literacy is developing disciplinary literacy practices, such as obtaining information from text and sharing investigation results through talk and writing. To support students to develop disciplinary literacy practices in science, educators must provide opportunities for them to work with multiple…

The Preschool Life Skills program is an intervention package designed to teach functional skills to prevent problem behavior in typically developing children. The purpose of the current study was to evaluate the effects of the instructional package (renamed "Life Skills") with children with developmental disabilities. The program…

Background and Context: Using a transformative learning framework, this qualitative study examines the perspectives and practices of 70 middle and high school content area teachers who attended two or more summer professional development workshops. Objective: This study describes how teachers' disciplinary perspectives and backgrounds influence…

Two teacher educators offer several activities for youth to examine representations of adolescence by writing poetry, studying social media, and analyzing young adult literature through a youth lens.

Background: Initial teacher education (ITE) research in South Africa shows gaps in preservice teachers' (PSTs) primary mathematics knowledge. Aim: We study the mental mathematics understandings and teaching experiences of three PSTs who achieved high gains for learners they taught mental mathematics to using the Mental Starters Assessment Project…

Rooted in arts-based learning, funds of knowledge, and culturally sustaining pedagogies, this paper describes the experiences of a cohort of preservice teachers who co-created arts integration units with emergent bilingual students, engaging them in the creation of plays based on culturally relevant children's literature. This cohort was designed…

Purpose: The research aims to evaluate whether this educational approach is being implemented in a Portuguese public university and looking for explicit references to education for sustainable development (ESD) in the online descriptions of course units (CU). Design/methodology/approach: The research design adopted for this qualitative research…

Achieving high-quality preschool at scale is challenging; to do so likely entails a combination of program standards, teacher qualifications and compensation, on-site quality monitoring, and professional development (PD). This study aims to examine the impact of investments in PD within the context of an expansion of universal preschool in one of…

In the 1960s, the High School Geography Project (HSGP) was developed in the effort to improve geography's status within high school social studies curriculum. Now, nearly 50 years later, can selected units and activities be implemented in today's social studies curriculum? This article attempts to rekindle students' interest in geography education…

While the International Baccalaureate's Middle Years Programme (MYP) is growing in popularity in Australia and across the globe, few studies have examined the benefits and challenges of this IB programme for supporting student learning. Using a qualitative case study design of three Australian schools that formerly offered the MYP, we investigated…

Conducted in an urban alternative education program for adolescents ages 17-21, this study provides an overview of a professional development program that sought to support teachers in developing unit plans that incorporated backwards design principles and culturally relevant and sustaining instruction. The authors offer a qualitative thematic…

This 13th report in WestEd's evaluation of the K-8 Early Implementers Initiative for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provides an extensive response to the following question: What does NGSS science teaching look like in the classroom? The report first discusses Initiative teachers' experiences with four instructional practices that…

Currently, there is still an opposition of teachers to the implementation of new technologies in an educational context. Although several studies point out the relevance of the use of information and communication technologies in pedagogical practices, providing educational contexts more focused on learning practices and fostering more active and…