Professional learning communities (PLCs) provide an increasingly common structure for teachers' professional development. The effectiveness of PLCs depends on the content and quality of the participants' discourse. This dissertation was conducted to add to an understanding of the science content needed to prepare to teach science, and the…

High school dropouts are an ongoing concern in North Carolina. Although improvements have been made in recent years, 13,488 North Carolina students did not complete high school in 2011-2012 (Public Schools of North Carolina Consolidated Report, 2011-2012). This research study seeks to identify common, specific characteristics, strategies, and…

Nearly two-thirds of students require some form of remediation before taking college-level classes, and community colleges have become increasingly important in providing this education. Unfortunately, relatively few students complete the developmental courses required to make a transition to college-level work. Based on a three-year study of over…

The case study reported here examined three scaffolding practices employed by two teachers in two Year 5 and 6 mathematics classrooms. One scaffolding practice was the use of discussion. This paper describes the use of whole class discussions as scaffolding, drawing upon observations of six mathematics lessons in each classroom and the responses…

While there has been worldwide interest in Japanese Lesson Study as a model for teacher professional learning, there has been less research into authentic implementation of the problem-solving lesson structure that underpins mathematics research lessons in Japan. Findings from a Lesson Study project involving teachers from three Victorian primary…

Knowledge management has proven to be a sustainable competitive advantage for many organizations. Knowledge management systems are abundant, with multiple functionalities. The literature reinforces the use of workflow automation with knowledge management systems to benefit organizations; however, it was not known if process automation yielded…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to discover the essence of middle school service-learning teachers' experiences with service-learning. Service-learning is "a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility,…

California community colleges are facing an impending leadership crisis due to a lack of formal preparations related to leadership training practices, proper budgetary resources, and misconceptions associated with administration, which could prevent the preparation of individual advancement into academic leadership roles. Currently, formal…

This paper builds on data from a project where iPads were used in a lower secondary school in Denmark to support school development and inclusive learning environments. The paper explores how iPads enter into and work as part of an ecology of learning in five classes in lower secondary school. The paper argues that we should disengage approaches…

Background: The research community has long documented educational disparities along race lines. Countless studies have shown that urban African American and Latino students are systematically denied educational resources in comparison to their white counterparts, resulting in persistent achievement disparities (Ladson-Billings, 2006;…

The authors examined the difference in standardized test performance when familiar versus unfamiliar examiners tested 26 preschool and elementary-aged children with autism. The children were matched by age, severity, and developmental level and then randomly placed into familiar and unfamiliar examiner groups. Familiarity with the examiner was…

Achievement in a domain is normally defined by the experts within the curricula. This exploratory study reported student conception of achievement in physical education, attempting to address two questions: (1) what do students expect to achieve and (2) how do students view the achievement in physical education. Students (N = 48) purposefully…

Research in the past decades has investigated the time course of the acquisition of physical knowledge in early development in much detail. However, few is known about the motives that actually lead infants to interact with the objects of their physical world. The research presented here investigated in two experiments if 11-month-old infants'…

In 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded the investigation of a $45 million question: How can we identify and develop effective teaching? Now that the findings from their Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project have been released, it's clear they asked a simpler question, namely, What other measures match up well with value-added…

Pedagogical content knowledge has been defined by Magnusson, Krajcik, and Borko (1999) and others for the purpose of understanding science teachers' knowledge and teaching practice. It is hoped that by improving our understanding of science teachers' PCK, we can improve the education and practice of science teachers. Research describing…