Teaching the evaluation of information resources can be daunting for both students and educators. In an information environment in which resource types are ever-changing, how does the school librarian assess the evaluative skills of students? The assessments ought to reflect the malleable nature of online resources. To engage students in a…

Planning, conducting, and reporting leading-edge research requires professionals who are capable of highly skilled reading. This study reports the development of an empirically informed computer-based learning environment designed to foster the acquisition of reading comprehension strategies that mediate expertise in the social sciences. Empirical…

What constitutes a high quality teacher education program and what standards teacher candidates should meet before receiving their teaching credential? This volume advances deep understanding of the nature and sources of policy affecting the preparation of teachers in the U.S. and the conflicts or interconnections of these policies with the…

At its heart are the National Education Association's "Status of the American Public School Teacher" surveys, which are conducted every five years and offer unprecedented insights into the professional lives and experiences of teachers nationwide. This volume analyzes and summarizes the survey's findings, while also offering commentaries…

The content standards reform movement and the accountability movement that have occurred over the past 10 to 20 years have received much attention among educational professionals and the general public. The federal government legislated accountability measures with the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2000. The Pennsylvania…

What does it mean to be a graduate student and to "do" graduate school? What happens when we shift our focus away from learning as a process of gaining expertise in a field or being socialized into the literacy conventions of a discipline and instead consider the ontological component of learning--the idea that learning entails becoming a certain…

This paper describes teacher responses to a framework designed to support teacher planning for technology. It includes a learning experience outside the classroom [LEOTC] and is designed specifically for five-year-old students. The planning framework draws together characteristics of technology education, junior primary classrooms and LEOTC to…

During 2009-10 the University of Ballarat implemented the open-source learning management system (LMS) "Moodle" alongside its existing legacy LMS, "Blackboard". While previous IT implementations have been troublesome at the university, notably the student information and finance management systems in 2008-09, the…

This paper presents the details and examines the outcomes of a professional development program created for instructors who are beyond the novice stage as online instructors, but desire and require further support to develop their online teaching expertise to meet their students' learning needs and their own teaching goals. This program…

In this case study, you are the associate superintendent and chief academic officer (CAO) of a large school district in the southwest. The case involves the complex issue of how to serve the burgeoning adolescent immigrant population in your school district. The study considers how a school that is situated in the heart of a Hispanic/Latino…

A key problem in developing a virtual community for co-constructing learning resources is the need to have people volunteer to share their expertise. In this paper, we introduce the first phase of our research in which we examine strategies for encouraging participants to share in the system. We began by designing an intervention model based on…

The twofold purpose of this study was to trace prospective and practicing mathematics teachers' understandings of content area reading instruction in relation to domain knowledge in mathematics, and to examine the extent to which online pedagogical mentoring supported the integration of such instruction and knowledge. The design called for two…

The standards movement in the US has ballooned over the past generation of education reforms to the extent that standards have become a prominent feature of the educational architecture. Most curriculum planning is informed by local, state, and/or interstate content area standards. While the 1980s central focus on the international competitiveness…

In this study, I developed three methods for the assessment of high-school students' environmental decision-making skills. The three methods were developed based on perspectives of decision-making expertise in psychology and are named "Satisfying Results," "Coherence," and "Process Decomposition." Satisfying Results looked directly at the choices…

As 48 states charge ahead with plans to adopt common academic standards, the U.S. Department of Education will enlist experts and the public to help design a $350 million competition for the next step: the development of common tests. In coming weeks, top Education Department officials will travel to Atlanta, Boston, and Denver for a series of…