This study examined the effects of a graduate level, professional development (PD) course on teachers' perceptions, attitudes, self-efficacy, and behavioral intentions regarding the use of digital games in the classrooms, teacher involvement in educational game design, and constructionist gaming. Twenty-one teachers participated in the study. Both…

The CDIO teaching mode is one kind of the engineering education concept, and now it is gradually adopted in English language teaching. Integrated English is one of the basic courses for English major students, and adopting the CDIO teaching mode in this course can improve different abilities of English major students, such as the professional…

Although some students might struggle with problem posing, the positive effects on student learning and abilities may be far reaching for those who engage in this activity. Problem posing requires students to create their own problems rather than to solve problems posed by others. Problem posing is not regularly taught; however, reform proponent…

I present a viable learning trajectory for prospective elementary teachers' number sense development with a focus on whole-number place value, addition, and subtraction. I document a chronology of classroom mathematical practices in a Number and Operations course. The findings provide insights into prospective elementary teachers' number sense…

While previous studies mainly focused on children's additive and multiplicative reasoning abilities, we studied third to sixth graders' "preference" for additive or multiplicative relations. This was investigated by means of schematic problems that were "open" to both types of relations, namely arrow schemes containing three…

Research related to the teaching and learning of 21st century biotechnology in additional science in Malaysia is seldom conducted. This study was carried out to find out the problems teachers and students face in biotechnology teaching and learning, and the appropriateness of the inclusion of 21st century skills, namely digital-era literacy skill,…

This study examined the performance gap experienced by high achieving grade four and five students at the Kallang International Day School (KIDS) who were not demonstrating growth in math results from fall to spring as measured by the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) test (NWEA, 2017). The purpose of this study was to apply the gap analysis…

A reform movement in the United States has focused on STEM education and 21st century soft skills such as critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. This spotlight on STEM instruction provided an opportunity to explore how K-14 STEM teacher participants perceived a Design Thinking Instructional Problems (DTIP) approach to…

Before the mobile revolution, the father of educational technology Seymour Papert declared, "[T]he computer's true power as an educational medium lies...in the ability to facilitate and extend children's awesome natural ability and drive to construct, hypothesize, explore, experiment, evaluate, draw conclusions--in short to learn--all by…

This dissertation studies students' identity negotiation in a project-based Advanced Placement (AP) Environmental Science class. The College Board has encouraged schools to diversify enrollment in AP STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) courses, in which White and Asian males have been historically overrepresented. This trend may be…

Purpose: The purpose of this phenomenological study was to describe the strengths-based leadership behaviors (problem solving, conflict management, leading change, decision making and planning) of highly successful athletic directors in the California community colleges and to identify the areas in which they feel strongest. An additional purpose…

This body of work contains three articles that support the need for K-12 teachers to write professionally and personally. The research sought to explore the questions of initial influences to write, essentials to sustain writing and the relationship of teacher-writer development to self authorship. Much of the previous literature produced by…

To investigate the effects that experiences of programming have on parents' concerns about programming education in primary schools, a survey was carried out before and after a programming seminar for children and their parents. Participation in the programming seminar seemed to boost parents' expectations and decrease their anxieties about…

Creating continuously improving education systems could be the antidote to one-off education reforms that come and go with little to show for the effort. What distinguishes continuous improvement from other reform strategies is its focus on the underlying architecture of the system that is producing undesirable outcomes (e.g., low graduation…

This thesis describes how principals and teacher leaders facilitate organizational learning while implementing a 21st century learning initiative through instructional leadership practices. The inclusion of 21st century learning skillsets and initiatives in the classroom stems from educational research that recognizes that students need to be…