This article draws on research from literacy and special education, as well as insights from autobiographies and memoirs authored by people on the autism spectrum, to argue that all students, including those without disability labels, benefit when students within the autism spectrum are included in classrooms with their same-age peers. An overview…

Findings from the ninth triennial administration of the National Survey of First-Year Seminars, describing the nature and extent of first-year seminars on American college campuses. Drawn from a broad sample of colleges and universities from every institutional type, control, and size, the survey addresses topics including seminar characteristics…

This article presents a design-based research study of the implementation of an energy unit developed for middle school students. The unit utilized Google Earth and a geographic information system (GIS) to support student understanding of the world's energy resources and foster their spatial thinking skills. Findings from the prototype study…

Online learning has become a major force in higher education, creating a need to understand the relationship between instructional support factors and learner satisfaction. This study focused on students who had enrolled in online courses. The setting for this study was a Midwestern community college that offered online courses for college…

"Teach Like a Champion" offers effective teaching techniques to help teachers, especially those in their first few years, become champions in the classroom. These powerful techniques are concrete, specific, and are easy to put into action the very next day. Training activities at the end of each chapter help the reader further their…

Bilingual education has taken center stage in Illinois with a new education mandate; many public preschools will be required to offer bilingual education to all three- and four-year-olds who do not speak English. Dual-language (DL) classrooms represent one very promising model in bilingual education that is being used to develop these new…

Technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK or TPACK)--the highly practical professional educational knowledge that enables and supports technology integration--is comprised of teachers' concurrent and interdependent knowledge of curriculum content, general pedagogy, and technological understanding. Teachers' planning--which expresses…

The objective of this paper is to which extend the didactic format of studio-based group-work is applicable for creating a common-ground for Interaction Design Education in European Perspective. The current debate on design education shows us a landscape of different initiatives. So far difficulties have arisen in the area of accreditation and…

This article is a case study that aimed at understanding the dynamics of two complementary communities involved in a distance education graduate program: one community of practice formed by the instructors and instructional developers, who designed and developed the program, and another created by the students and instructor in one of the online…

Although classroom-oriented instructional development (ID) models have the potential to help teachers think and plan for effective instruction with technology, research studies have shown that they are not widely employed. Many of these models have not factored in the complexities that teachers faced when planning for instruction in…

Like most institutions offering programs for career and technical educators, the University of South Florida (USAF) has experienced the impact of changes in the field. Thirty years ago there were undergraduate and graduate programs in career and technical education (CATE) at every university in the Florida state system involving more than 50…

This article describes how an experienced instructional designer thinks about and uses learning theories to inform instructional design decisions. It uses a vision metaphor to provide a simple heuristic framework for identifying the nature of instructional problems and relating different types of problems to useful theoretical perspectives,…

Environmental sustainability is one of the most pressing concerns of the twenty-first century, and working toward sustainability will require broad lifestyle and cultural shifts, particularly in industrialized societies. Yet despite a growing recognition of the importance of issues such as climate change, food security, transportation, and…

Planning engaging and effective lessons for middle and high school learners is one of the fundamental components of successful secondary teaching (Skowron 2001; Butt, 2006). While Wiggins & McTighe (1998) have set forth a framework for "backwards planning" in unit design, this article provides a framework for employing backwards planning in…

Two popular instructional models in middle and high school are the sport education model (SEM) and the tactical games model (TGM). The SEM prepares students to become competent, literate, and enthusiastic sportspersons. The TGM prepares students to be able to play games using a tactical approach. Combining the models to form a sport education…