Students in this post-industrial technological age require opportunities for the acquisition of new skills, especially in the marketplace of innovation. A pedagogical strategy that is becoming more and more popular within social studies classrooms is the use of computer and video games as enhancements to everyday lesson plans. Computer/video games…

This article reviews 37 empirical studies, selected from 363 articles and 20 journals, on assessment feedback published between 2000 and 2011. The reviewed articles, many of which came out of studies in the UK and Australia, reflect the most current issues and developments in the area of assessing disciplinary writing. The article aims to outline…

Emphasis on improving student learning has brought increased attention to the execution of schoolwide instructional reforms in general and the use of data by teacher teams in particular as an expected element of a school's instructional reform strategy. With this in mind, the purpose of this article is to focus important attention on the work…

Research into the distance learning of languages is now established as a significant avenue of enquiry in language teaching, with evident research trajectories in several domains. This article selects and analyses significant areas of investigation in distance language learning and teaching to identify new and emerging gaps, along with research…

This is the report of an investigation in partnership with a team of junior secondary classroom teachers of the potential of posing more challenging tasks to their students. A range of data sources are used to represent the experience of teachers and students in a unit of work that incorporated a range of challenging tasks. Students learned the…

Feedback provides a vehicle for integrating all components of formative instructional practices: clear learning targets, evidence of student learning, and student ownership in the process. Feedback is the keystone to formative instructional practices as it is one of the most powerful instructional tools available. This paper (a) describes the role…

As worldwide energy shortages and environmental degradation increase, along with steady increases in population, current science and technology are confronted with many challenges to successfully sustain our society. Among the existing promising choices, photocatalysis has been widely considered as a potential solution to energy and environment…

Modeling differentiated instruction is one way to demonstrate how educators can incorporate instructional strategies to address students' needs, interests, and learning styles. This article discusses how secondary teacher candidates learn to focus on content--the "what" of instruction; process--the "how" of instruction;…

Several studies found that direct instruction and task structuring can effectively promote children's ability to design unconfounded experiments. The present study examined whether the impact of these interventions extends to other scientific reasoning skills by comparing the inquiry activities of 55 fifth-graders randomly assigned to one of…

Despite the widespread availability of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and some research into specific pedagogical practices using them, there has been little research on the role of these technologies in shaping broader pedagogical approaches in higher education (HE). Increased experimentation in using ICTs raises questions…

The Science Writing Heuristic (SWH) laboratory instruction approach has been used successfully over a decade to engage students in laboratory activities. SWH-based instruction emphasizes knowledge construction through individual writing and reflection, and collaborative learning as a group. In the SWH approach, writing is a core component of…

Although there have been any number of national reading reform efforts over the years, there is little evidence that such efforts have been sustained in schools over time. This study focused on addressing 2 questions: To what extent have Reading First schools in 2 states sustained the key elements of this reform over time? To what extent has…

Interactive multimedia learning environments incorporate interactive features, such as questioning, through which questions are posed to students and feedback is delivered on their answers. An experiment was conducted comparing two forms of questioning. The participants learned about geology with a multimedia environment that included questioning…

This research provides business educators who teach retailing and services courses with an innovative way to encourage students to engage in problem-based learning solving by incorporating reality television into their curricula. The authors explore the reality television genre from several theoretical perspectives to lend support to the…

The environmental issues we face as individuals and as a society are pervasive and ingrained in our cultural ways of being so that we can no longer look to science and technology to solve these problems alone. Instead, educators have been charged with providing students with environmental education through community-based service learning and…