Immersion programs face a variety of challenges that are common to the field, such as lack of materials appropriate for students' language abilities, assessment, teacher recruitment and retention, balancing content and language, and relevant, high quality professional development for teachers. However, within specific micro-contexts, other issues…

Employers seek employees with skills that have been correlated with specific credentials including academic certifications, industry certifications, and college degrees. In order to meet these demands, policymakers are pressing higher education institutions to facilitate higher rates of credential completion among college students. This requires…

This naturalistic inquiry case study examined the experiences of five college men participating in a two-week, summer study abroad course administered by a Midwestern, public land-grant university. The short-term program model is popular with students and universities in the United States as an affordable and convenient way to increase the number…

Both history and education courses comprise a significant portion of certification requirements for prospective history teachers. Teaching ambitiously requires mastery of many practices and bodies of knowledge, including disciplinary, pedagogical, and pedagogical content knowledge, learned in that history and education coursework. However,…

Examining the justification for current evaluation policy reveals that such policy rests on two assumptions related to the impact on the work of teachers: (1) evaluations are necessary because teachers need to be rated, sanctioned, or rewarded in order to be motivated to improve their practice; and (2) evaluations yield information that is useful…

Economically disadvantaged students face an array of adversities during their childhood. With the media having an outstanding influence on the self-esteem of children, it is important that they have the tools necessary to question images they encounter. A Visual Culture curriculum in combination with a ceramics course can provide students with the…

Treatment integrity is an important concern in treatment centers but is often overlooked. Performance feedback is a well-established approach to improving treatment integrity, but is underused and undervalued. One way to increase its value to treatment centers may be to expose unrealized benefits on the observer who collects the performance…

Graphs represent complex information. They show relationships and help students see patterns and compare data. Students often do not appreciate the illuminating power of graphs, interpreting them literally rather than as symbolic representations (Leinhardt, Zaslavsky, and Stein 1990). Students often read graphs point by point instead of seeing…

Within the current accountability framework of public education, kindergarten teachers face the challenge of balancing traditional developmental programing and current academically oriented curriculum. Central to this challenge is teachers' uses of assessment to measure and communicate student learning in relation to their curricular stance.…

Invoking the work of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Liselott Mariett Olsson, the author of this short essay puts forth the concept of "becoming-unfaithful" as a way to rethink the relational and ethical complexities of being there with children through research. Re-encountering his own participatory movements while engaged in the…

It seems intuitive to think that previous exposure or interaction with an environment should make it easier to search through it and, no doubt, this is true in many real-world situations. However, in a recent study, we demonstrated that previous exposure to a scene does not necessarily speed search within that scene. For instance, when observers…

Tutoring technologies for supporting learning from errors via negative feedback are highly developed and have proven their worth in empirical evaluations. However, observations of empirical tutoring dialogs highlight the importance of positive feedback in the practice of expert tutoring. We hypothesize that positive feedback works by reducing…

Capacity is a real and pressing challenge for educators tasked with implementing robust evaluation systems that include multiple measures of performance. In response to questions from the field, the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders has gathered emerging strategies from policymakers and practitioners who are grappling with capacity challenges…

The present study examined the predictive validity of a classroom observation measure, the "Classroom Strategies Assessment System" (CSAS)-Observer Form, as a predictor of student performance on statewide tests of mathematics and English language arts. The CSAS is a teacher practice assessment that measures evidence-based instructional…

Technology can play an important role in the development of reading fluency. Taking notes, recording brainstorm sessions, peer-reviewing, and publishing are all skills that support students in becoming academically literate for advanced schooling. This descriptive case study explored the use of the iBook application and features that come…