For several years, WestEd's Measure to Learn and Improve (MLI) project team has kept California state policy leaders informed about the statewide implementation of the California Academic Standards in English language arts and mathematics, by summarizing and disseminating results from the RAND Corporation's annual American Educator Panel (AEP)…

The world all around us is rapidly developing. We are witnessing the rapid evolution of technology and communication. This means new challenges and responsibilities to future strategies and attitudes. Today's operating systems and development environments apply the principle of OOP; therefore today's developments are inconceivable without the…

Early childhood educators currently provide content focused learning opportunities for children in the areas of well-being and environmental education. However, these are usually seen as discrete content areas and educators are challenged with responding to children's interests in popular-culture inspired food products given these influence their…

Education for sustainable development (ESD) espouses student-centred, transformative pedagogies that promote learning through active, participatory and experiential learning. Yet, traditional lectures provide limited opportunities for engaging students in such pedagogies. This article reports on the inclusion of sustainability pedagogies within…

Researchers have developed many different computerized interventions designed to teach students about the dangers of substance use. Following in this tradition, we produced a series of video games called "Bacon Brains." However, unlike many other programs, ours focused on the "Science of Addiction," providing lessons on how…

Comics are popular with adolescents because of their features of humor, narrative, and visual imagery. The purposes of this study were to examine the learning outcomes and emotional perceptions of reading a science comic book and a science text booklet for students of different levels of achievement, and to explore the main factors of the two…

Through the transformation of undergraduate STEM courses, the Colorado Learning Assistant Program recruits and prepares talented STEM majors for careers in teaching by providing them with early, sustained teaching experiences. The research reported here compares teaching practices of K-12 teachers who served as learning assistants (LAs) as…

This qualitative study explores how a community of enquiry pedagogy in combination with a social semiotic approach to visual analysis influenced the changing knowledge and concepts of knowledge experienced by students in an undergraduate teacher education course. The art of the Constitutional Court of South Africa was the focus of our study and…

A rich science learning experience not only captures students' attention but also motivates them to investigate and solve problems and investigate how scientists carry out their work. This article describes how secondary science coordinator Patrick Brown's found success teaching students the nature of science by engaging them in…

What is a sense of period? And how can pupils' sense of period be developed? Questions such as these have troubled history teachers for many years, often revolving around debates over the role played by empathy and imagination in coming to know a period on its own terms. Rather than adopt a comparative approach, Dan Smiths decided in his teaching…

Students' misconceptions concerning colour phenomena and the apparent complexity of the underlying concepts--due to the different domains of knowledge involved--make its teaching very difficult. We have developed and tested a teaching device, the addition table of colours (ATC), that encompasses additive and subtractive mixtures in a single…

In today's media-saturated societies it can be assumed that encounters with therapists and other experts may have implications for adult learning. Taking the point of departure in the idea of public pedagogy, and by using a close-up analysis of interview talk, the pedagogical agency the media may have on parenting is investigated. Drawing…

This study investigates the effect of word study instruction on the orthographic knowledge of college students enrolled in a developmental reading course. Results revealed significantly greater improvement in orthographic knowledge in students who received word study instruction when compared with those in a control group, suggesting that the word…

Field trips can provide unique opportunities for authentic, meaningful, and self-determined learning. Capitalizing on these opportunities requires that field trips be structured. A common way to do this is through the use of educational materials such as worksheets. The extent to which the guide's or teacher's autonomy-supportive or…

Research has shown that students have difficulties with understanding the process of determining whether an object is speeding up or slowing down, especially when it is applied to the analysis of motion in the negative direction. As inductively organized learning through its scaffolding sequencing supports the process of knowledge acquisition…