The importance of teachers' and children's collaborative engagement in shared learning activities has a strong evidence base in sociocultural research and is promoted as an effective pedagogy in New Zealand's national curriculum. However, what this means for teachers' practice is unclear. Teachers can engage in practices thought to be…

From the early elementary grades through high school, the Common Core State Standards ask students to organize and explain their ideas in oral presentations, use visual aids, and speak appropriately for various contexts and tasks. Although teachers could give assignments that teach some of these skills in isolation, the authors have found that…

This exploratory study investigates the relationship between teachers' continuing professional development (CPD) and their beliefs about learning and teaching, in a Dutch secondary education context. Two hundred sixty teachers participated in a survey focused on teachers' updating, reflective, and collaborative activities, as well as their…

Promoting independence in all students is one important part of education. It can be difficult for educators to identify meaningful tasks that students with severe disabilities can complete with full independence. By incorporating visual supports into a student's independent work, the teacher is providing the student with an opportunity to…

This feature article explores the topic of trains from their early history to recent trends in railroading. A glossary provides related vocabulary, a sidebar called "Romance of the Rails" adds colorful detail about train songs and railroad lore. An additional section, "Classroom Activities," by John Silver, presents three…

Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) often experience difficulties with motor skill learning and performance. The pool is a unique learning environment that can help children with ASDs learn or improve aquatic skills, fitness, and social skills. A pool-based approach is also aligned with the elements of dynamic systems theory, which…

Equivalence relations and partitions are two interconnected ideas that play important roles in advanced mathematics. While students encounter the informal notion of equivalence in many courses, the formal definition of an equivalence relation is typically introduced in a junior level transition-to-proof course. This paper reports the results of a…

The paper intends to develop a student-centered and school-based method to incorporate computer game play (GP) and game design (GD) activities into school by discovering students' views about why and how to incorporate. The paper first critiques the current GP and GD activities, which are designer-centric on a touch-and-go basis, falling short of…

Problem posing, by which learners create new problems by themselves, is an important activity in mathematics education. However, novice learners have difficulty in posing problems, particularly when formulating appropriate solution structures of problems. Although they are provided with example problems that can serve as hints for composing novel…

This article addresses two research questions concerning nurses' engagement in social learning activities after errors at work. Firstly, we investigated how this engagement relates to nurses' interpretations of the error situation and perceptions of a safe team climate. The results indicate that the individual estimation of an error as relevant to…

This article reports a theory-driven experimental study that evaluates the effects of an annotation functionality on online social interaction and individual learning outcomes. The central hypothesis of this study is that directly addressing a part of a text by annotating it and then connecting each annotation with its related discussion can…

Many scientists have been fascinated by how the brain works, but much of what is known about the brain has been discovered within the last twenty years. In this article, the author explores how thinking and using one's mind are essential to understanding. She contends that children need to be in control of their learning; the adult's role is to…

Recently, support has grown for using comic books and graphic novels to enhance and support literacy instruction. In some ways, it's surprising that the medium has only recently enjoyed such support. Stereotyped views of comics as unsophisticated, disposable entertainment or material written to the lowest common denominator fail to consider the…

The "14 Characteristics of Effective Health Education Curricula" identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of Adolescent and School Health promote teaching ideas designed to personalize information and engage students through activities which are both student centered and interactive. Effective health education efforts…

Pedagogic approaches that draw on reflective practices and experiential activities are valued for their perceived ability to enhance multicultural understanding. The use of food-based assignments is not uncommon in multicultural counseling courses; however, the authors contend that although these activities may be experiential in nature, they are…