Does receipt of School Improvement Grants (SIG) funding to implement a school intervention model have an impact on outcomes for low-performing schools? This study answers this question using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) that exploits cutoff values on the continuous variables used to define SIG eligibility tiers, comparing outcomes in…

Some recent science education scholarship has called for a renewed focus on empowering learners to engage with science for personally and socially meaningful purposes. However, engaging with science in these ways requires that learners adopt epistemic aims in their activity, which we cannot take for granted. I argue here that serious games could…

This quasi-experimental study compared academic learning in project-centered instruction with group projects, project-centered instruction with individual projects, and teacher-led instruction. A repeated measures pre and posttest design was used to measure the change in Social Studies content learning in sixth grade students for three different…

Stan is a free and open-source C++ program that performs Bayesian inference or optimization for arbitrary user-specified models and can be called from the command line, R, Python, Matlab, or Julia and has great promise for fitting large and complex statistical models in many areas of application. We discuss Stan from users' and developers'…

Many educational products have flooded the American K-12 market in recent years, launched by startups and established educational institutions alike. Many of these startups will fail, and seasoned entrepreneurs and business strategists suggest that failure results primarily from the inability to access a sizeable market and address the needs of…

Science teaching emerged due to an attempt to understand the world around us and a sense of wonder at nature and survived until today by means of being supported by new research and findings. The implementation of science in schools is carried out with curriculums. The main purpose of the curriculum of science courses is to train all students in…

A meta-analysis of single-subject research was conducted examining the effectiveness of computer-assisted interventions (CAI) for teaching a wide range of skills to students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) within the school-based context. Intervention effects were measured by computing improvement rate difference (IRD), which is a simple…

Popular media influences the ideas about science constructed by the public, affecting outcomes such as scientific knowledge, the pipeline of future scientists, and the public engagement with science. A growing recognition of the impact of entertainment media has resulted in public policy organizations promoting the use of science consultants to…

This qualitative study design utilizes embedded instruction with a constant comparative approach to explore the personal epistemologies of preschool children during peer focus groups. Personal epistemology is an individual's belief about knowledge and knowing, and little is known about early onset of epistemological development. This case study…

Textual production is a human dialogical business--an aspect of humanness and mutual connectedness--that is too easily forgotten and yet it has important implications for teaching. Using dialogue can result in learning where receptiveness and openness to new possibilities are valued above such things as task completion and the fulfilling of…

In light of the literature that deals with challenges of outdoor education, this paper presents exemplary practices in field trips to natural environments. We offer an analysis of 62 field trips of students in grades 4-8 (age 10-14), guided by professional guides or by teachers. In aiming at elucidating the qualities of exemplary fieldtrips, we…

Background: Ample research provides evidence about the influence of effective teaching practices on student success. Yet the adoption of such practices has been slow at many institutions. Efforts to bridge the gap between research and practice are needed. Purpose: We describe an institutional change plan we developed to bridge this research-to-…

Identification questions (or IDs), according to some critics, merely test factual knowledge (which involves only memorization), but for them to be effective learning tools for students, teachers must also make sure that students develop their understanding of the significance or importance of people, events, and concepts both in the context of…

I read with a great pleasure the heated dialogue on Dialogic Pedagogy between Eugene Matusov and Kiyotaka Miyazaki. It provided me with one of those rare occasions where I could both witness, and also join, the workings of two minds as they struggled with and against each other to construct, de-construct, and reconstruct their visions of dialogic…

Networked learning and learning networks are commonplace concepts in most contemporary discourse on learning in the 21st century. This special issue provides a collection of studies that address the need for a growing body of empirical work to extent the limited understanding of the use and benefits of networks in relation to learning and…