As states move forward on the development of their Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) plans, incorporating the best of the feedback received from stakeholders along the way is a critical step in the process. All states are required by law to meaningfully engage with a wide array of stakeholders as they develop their plans to ensure that new…

The primary mission of the public schools has been to prepare students to be effective citizens capable of sustaining a vibrant and inclusive democracy. The nation's founders believed that the profound experiment in republican government that they were initiating "depended on citizens' ability to participate in public life and to exhibit…

Most higher education institutions employ a traditional, summative scoring system to report student grades at the end of each semester. This system is limited in that it offers a final grade based on individual assignments completed throughout the semester without testing whether students have sufficiently understood the learning objectives of the…

The quality and standard of South African examination questions for the grade 12 examination have become an important issue for the South African education system. So far, the focus of empirical research has been on factors that lead to poor performance in the Physical sciences as well as the alignment of the grade 12 Physical Sciences examination…

The authors explore how framing theory and the method of frame-reflective discourse analysis provide foundations for the emerging discipline of serious games (SGs) research. Starting with Wittgenstein's language game and Berger and Luckmann's social constructivist view on science, the authors demonstrate why a definitional or taxonomic approach to…

Attempts to improve student achievement typically focus on changing the educational environment (e.g., better schools, better teachers) or on personal characteristics of students (e.g., intelligence, self-control). The 6 articles in this special issue showcase an additional approach, emanating from social psychology, which focuses on students'…

Adolescent religion is increasingly well researched but the youth rallies staged by many Christian groups remain understudied. This article adds to our understanding of these rallies through a case study of a large Catholic youth rally in Toronto. We identify the reported religious experiences of rally participants and compare them with the goals…

Standard 2 from the Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) Standards focuses on the importance of partnerships between P-12 schools and universities to enhance student learning and teacher candidate preparation. In the midst of discussions on how to improve partnerships between P-12 schools and universities, this article adds to…

This is a very difficult time in education. Neoliberal and neoconservative policies have had major effects on schools, on communities, on administrators, on teachers, and on all school staff. A new alliance has integrated education into a wider set of ideological commitments. The objectives in education are the same as those that guide economic…

Courses: Intercultural Communication, Conflict and Communication, Interpersonal Communication. Objectives: After completing this single-class activity, students should be able to (1) differentiate between the avowed versus ascribed dimensions of cultural identity construction; (2) articulate the contested nature of cultural identity, including how…

Responsibilist approaches to virtue epistemology examine the epistemic significance of intellectual virtues like curiosity, attentiveness, intellectual humility, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, and intellectual tenacity. On one way of thinking about these traits, they are the deep personal qualities or character traits of a good thinker or…

The competency-based approach to vocational education is premised on narrow and dated conceptions of human functioning, performance and development. Its adoption is more driven by administrative concerns about measurable outcomes than educational processes and outcomes. Informed by educational science and earlier debates, this article discusses…

As part of the Redesign Professional Development (PD) Community of Practice, which includes 22 school systems across the country, Pittsburgh Public Schools is working to build greater alignment and coherence into its professional learning efforts. That means creating a district-wide professional learning system that helps the schools grow…

The traditional course-end evaluation for the general education courses at The Chinese University of Hong Kong can gauge student's perception of their attainment of the intended learning outcomes at the end of the course but can hardly reflect the changes of their perception from the beginning to the end. In order to trace the change in students'…

This article offers a model to assist music teachers in reflecting on their teaching practice in relation to their aims and values. Initially developed as a workshop aid for use on a music education MA program, the model is intended to provoke critical engagement with two prominent tensions in music education: that between mastery and enjoyment,…