A number of Australian universities have established and sponsored interdisciplinary communities of practice (CoPs) to develop teaching and learning. CoPs are popularly defined as groups of people who share a passion for something and, together, learn how to do it better. Without further specification, this definition is of limited use in…

The current U.S. education agenda places unprecedented attention on improving the quality of its roughly fifteen hundred teacher preparation programs. The effort places considerable weight on measuring program effectiveness and includes a push to hold programs accountable for their graduates' effects on student performance. Concerns regarding the…

The authors compared Web usability definitions, collected from library professionals at academic institutions of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) through online surveys in 2007 and 2012, to determine whether library practitioners' perspectives had altered as information technologies evolved during this time. The authors applied three…

Becoming a history teacher requires the integration of pedagogical knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and content knowledge. Because the integration of knowledge from different disciplines is a complex task, we investigated prompted learning journals as a method to support teacher students' knowledge integration. Fifty-two preservice…

The aim of this study is to examine preservice science teachers' skills of formulating hypotheses and identifying variables. The research has a phenomenological research design. The data was gathered qualitatively. In this study, preservice science teachers were first given two scenarios (Scenario-1 & Scenario-2) containing two different…

Purpose: School climate, or the physical and social conditions of the learning environment, has implications for academic achievement. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/Methodology/Approach: The authors examine how school climate varies by school-level characteristics in California using administrative data and the California School…

This study examined the effects of delayed recording on the accuracy of data recorded by special educators serving students with high- or low-incidence disabilities. A multi-element design was used to compare the accuracy of data recorded across three conditions: (a) immediately after a student's target behavior occurred, (b) immediately after the…

This study examines new principal coaching as an induction process and explores the emotional dimensions of educational leadership. Twelve principal coaches and new principals--six of each--participated in this qualitative study that employed emergent coding (Creswell, 2008; Denzin, 2005; Glaser & Strauss, 1998; Spradley, 1979). The major…

Analyzing evolutionary relationships requires that students have a thorough understanding of evidence and of how scientists use evidence to develop these relationships. In this lesson sequence, students work in groups to process many different lines of evidence of evolutionary relationships between ungulates, then construct a scientific argument…

Background: Institutions of higher education, specifically schools of education, should play a pivotal role in supporting educators' development of data literacy for teaching. While novice teachers are often prepared to use test-based assessment data, they learn these experiences in isolated courses that do not connect to instruction or school…

In the current climate of increasing fiscal and clinical accountability, information is required about overall program effectiveness using clinical data. These requests present a challenge for programs utilizing single-subject data due to the use of highly individualized behavior plans and behavioral monitoring. Subsequently, the diversity of the…

This article introduces the notion of individual network of practice (INoP) as a viable construct for analyzing academic (discourse) socialization in second language (L2) contexts. The authors provide an overview of social practice theories that have informed the development of INoP--community of practice (CoP; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger,…

The purpose of this study was to describe the measures used to evaluate principals in New Jersey in the first (pilot) year of the new principal evaluation system and examine three of the statistical properties of the measures: their variation among principals, their year-to-year stability, and the associations between these measures and the…

The purpose of this article is to identify the order of significance of the variables that affect science and mathematics achievement in middle school students. For this aim, the study deals with the relationship between science and math in terms of different angles using the perspectives of multiple causes-single effect and of multiple…

The Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA) has synthesized key data on English learners (ELs) into two-page PDF sheets, by topic, with graphics, plus key contacts. This fact sheet uses data from the 2013 American Community Survey (ACS) and applies specific definitions. An "English learner" student: (1) is ages 5 to 18; (2) attends…