"Underachievement" has been one of the dominant discourses in education in recent times, but it is unclear what is meant by the term "underachievement", and there is no widely accepted way of defining or measuring it. This paper describes the final stage of a large study which used contextualised models to identify students who…

Science in English primary schools has been judged a success, yet few pupils make the progress in secondary schools that their performance at the end of primary school suggested. Projects where pupils start science work at the end of the primary school and complete it at the start of secondary school--known as bridging units--have been suggested…

Meanings of "surprise" are wide and include uplifting and engaging facets like wonder and amazement on the one hand as well as ones that may be of the opposite nature like interruption and disrupt on the other. Pedagogically, educators who use surprise in class activities are focusing on students being "taken aback" by a situation, hopefully…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perceived differences between asynchronous online discussions and face-to-face discussions in a classroom setting. The students' reflections were analysed by following a qualitative research approach. The results showed that atmosphere, response, efficiency, interactivity and communication were the…

Two studies examined response to varying amounts of time in reading intervention for two cohorts of first-grade students demonstrating low levels of reading after previous intervention. Students were assigned to one of three groups that received (a) a single dose of intervention, (b) a double dose of intervention, or (c) no intervention.…

The use of clickers (also referred to as Audience Paced Feedback, Classroom Communication Systems, Personal Response Systems, Electronic Voting Systems, Student Response Systems, Audience Response Systems, voting-machines, and zappers) has grown in college chemistry classrooms within the last decade. This review summarizes the pedagogic…

As the use of web-based homework delivery and checking systems expands, we have greater need to evaluate how students engage with these systems and how changes in the systems influence student behavior. Reported here is the assessment of WeBWorK, an open-source web-based homework program used largely in postsecondary math and science courses, with…

This article reports findings from a qualitative study of the complexities of introducing preservice teachers to critical pedagogies for urban teaching. The study documents students' reactions to a set of seminar and reflective writing experiences around depictions of urban teachers in popular culture--in particular, Pink Floyd's song "Another…

Teachers who attempt to use inquiry-based, student-centered instructional tasks face challenges that go beyond identifying well-designed tasks and setting them up appropriately in the classroom. Because solution paths are usually not specified for these kinds of tasks, students tend to approach them in unique and sometimes unanticipated ways.…

Contemporary teacher education, like other aspects of tertiary education, involves regimes for assessing quality of teaching. These regimes include student assessment of and feedback on teaching. These are widely considered problematic, and yet there are few signs that teacher educators reject the notion that student responses have something of…

This paper examined the responses of second and third year engineering students in the University of Melbourne to a number of open-ended exercises which tap problem-solving skills in engineering design. (Editor/RK)

Author tackled the problems that children have in understanding Shakespeares plays. (RK)

Defined a system developed to help the student absorb basic course concepts. (Author/RK)

The present training study sought to determine if specific experimental procedures in paradigmatic language would cause differences in reading readiness test achievement among experimental, placebo, and control groups of beginning first-grade pupils. (Editor)