In "Using Learning Progressions to Design Vertical Scales that Support Coherent Inferences about Student Growth" (hereafter ULR), Briggs and Peck suggest that learning progressions could be used as the basis of vertical scales with naturally benchmarked descriptions of student proficiency. They propose and provide a single example of a…

My privileged opportunity to work with renowned Drama theorist, Dorothy Heathcote, in Melbourne in the 1970s, set a foundation for what I now call Theatre as Education research. Formerly a teacher of Secondary Drama, I became very experienced at creating plays with my students, based on their own ideas, or inspired by the stories of the community.…

In an era of rapid geographical data acquisition, interpretations of remote sensing products are an integral part of many undergraduate geography degree schemes but there are fewer opportunities for collection and processing of primary remote sensing data. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide a relatively inexpensive opportunity to introduce…

The concept of data based decision making has been in the forefront of educational reform for decades. Despite the fact that data could better inform the educational decisions teachers make, some educators lack understanding of data and assessment. This could lead to misinterpretation and poor use of the scores. The purpose of this literature…

In critiquing our paper on "The literacy performance of ex-Reading Recovery students between two and four years following participation in the program: Is this intervention effective for students with early reading difficulties?", Schwartz argues that we have engaged in pursuing political and ideological agendas as part of our ongoing…

One of the challenges many learning scientists face is the laborious task of coding large amounts of video data and consistently identifying social actions, which is time consuming and difficult to accomplish in a systematic and consistent manner. It is easier to catalog observable behaviours (e.g., body motions or gaze) without explicitly…

In winter 2014, I came upon an opportunity to conduct a case study on a team of middle school math teachers who initiated a study group to examine how a set of learning progressions could help them with their planning, instruction, and assessment. Learning progressions are research-based hypotheses about how students develop more sophisticated…

This paper examines sources of potential bias in systematic reviews and meta-analyses which can distort their findings, leading to problems with interpretation and application by practitioners and policymakers. It follows from an article that was published in the "Canadian Journal of Communication" in 1990, "Integrating Research…

Objective: To determine the level of moderate-vigorous-intensity physical activity (MVPA) assessed via self-report and accelerometer in the college population, and to examine intrapersonal and contextual variables associated with physical activity (PA). Participants: Participants were 77 college students at a university in the northwest sampled…

In this study, I provide a microgenetic-historical account of learning in an informal setting: the conceptual change that occurred while a university-based scientific research laboratory investigated the absorption of light in rod-based photoreceptors of coho salmon, which the "dogma" had suggested to be related to the migration between…

This paper features an expanded Web-based "Facilities Performance Indicators (FPI) Report." The purpose of APPA's Facilities Performance Indicators is to provide a representative set of statistics about facilities in educational institutions. "The Facilities Performance Indicators Report" is designed for survey…

This paper reports on the use of QlikView business intelligence software for use in a Business Intelligence (BI) course within an undergraduate information systems program. The course provides students with concepts related to data warehousing, data mining, visualizations, and software tools to provide business intelligence solutions for decision…

This article presents a dialogic qualitative interview design for a narrative study of six international UK university students' motivation for learning English. Based on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, this design was developed in order to address the limitations of member-checking [Lincoln, Y. S., and E. G. Guba. 1985. "Naturalistic…

Student evaluations of teaching are among the most accepted and important indicators of college teachers' performance. However, faculty and administrators can overinterpret small variations in mean teaching evaluations. The current research examined the effect of including statistical information on the interpretation of teaching evaluations.…

A news story claiming that the cream filling of a popular "double" cream sandwich cookie is not really "double" went viral in fall 2013. A high school mathematics teacher posted a blog entry describing how he and his students measured 20 cookies, analyzed the data, and concluded that the double cream cookies had only 1.86 times…