Educators at Thomas A. Edison Middle School have worked together to bring invention information and activities to life. One activity in particular, Ping-Pong Ball Invention Challenge, has proven a great success. The Ping-Pong Ball Invention Challenge was inspired by the basic rules for PBS's "Design Squad"'s "Pop Fly" activity. In this article,…

Regular education teachers may have received inadequate preparation to work with the variety of student disabilities encountered in the classroom, or they may have received limited training regarding the full range of learning disabilities and their effects on classroom performance. Along with problems in the area of math, students may also have…

Recognising school readiness as a national priority, the National Education Goals Panel identified the development of young children's approaches to learning as essential for achieving readiness. Approaches to learning include inclinations, attitudes, and learning styles. Despite wide agreement that learning approaches are critical for school…

The number of students studying abroad is continuing to grow, which allows for intercultural learning to take place while forming cross-cultural relationships. This intercultural understanding plays a vital role as businesses begin operating in the global marketplace where cross-cultural relationships and understanding are needed. International…

This article makes a case for the use of blended learning in teaching human development as a means to encourage higher-order student learning outcomes. The authors review literature regarding the use and effectiveness of blended learning, discuss an illustrative example of a redesign of a human development course, present outcomes from a…

Little did the author realize how much his first engineering project would change his career path, but when it came, he was hooked forever on doing R&D-type engineering. In this article, the author takes the reader back to his first really important electrical engineering project. While the technology he worked on back then is antiquated by…

One of the greatest challenges for English language arts teachers today is the call to engage students in more complex texts. Tim Gillespie, who has taught in public schools for almost four decades, has found the lenses of literary criticism a powerful tool for helping students tackle challenging literary texts. Tim breaks down the dense language…

The author has undergone a major shift in the way of teaching his undergraduate computer programming courses. In the classroom, the teacher's computer is connected to a splitter and a video projector that display the computer's screen to the entire class. Using this technology, the programming language itself is used live in class to help the…

With growing public interest in children's success in kindergarten, more studies are examining prekindergarten (pre-k) classroom characteristics and their relationship to children's school readiness. These studies, for the most part, have focused on classroom environment characteristics associated with overall program quality, especially as…

Education for scientific literacy entails the development of scientific knowledge and the ability to apply this knowledge and value judgments to decisions about real-life issues. This paper reports an attempt to involve secondary level biology students in making decisions about an authentic socio-scientific issue--that of bat conservation--through…

In many elementary classrooms, Thanksgiving is celebrated by donning homemade Pilgrim hats, grocery bag vests, and colorful construction-paper headdresses, as students join together to reenact the "first" Thanksgiving with a mock feast. Students compose journal entries on the topic, "what I am thankful for." These typical Thanksgiving activities,…

This paper investigates the relationship between schooling and conflict in Pakistan using an identity-construction lens. Drawing on data from curriculum documents, student responses to classroom activities, and single-sex student focus groups, it explores how students in four state primary schools in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP),…

The purpose of this paper is to present a novel way to stimulate learning, creativity, and thinking based on a new understanding of activity-based learning (ABL) and two methods for developing metacognitive-based activities for the classroom. ABL, in this model, is based on the premise that teachers are distillers and facilitators of information…

Error correction is a classroom activity that rarely interests the students. When students are given back their written tests they are interested in the mark earned--not the errors made. This case study used cooperative learning as a technique for correcting students' errors in order to motivate them, raise their attention, and encourage them to…

The "What's the "matter" With XOD" activity addresses students' misconceptions and refines their ideas about phases of matter. This activity introduces the characteristics for solids, liquids, and gases, and begins a discussion about physical and chemical changes and how matter can cycle through different phases. Depending on class size and…