School-based mentors are essential partners with teacher preparation programs in preparing novice teachers to have the knowledge, skills, and professional commitments they need to be strong teachers from day one. In many ways, the demands of mentoring, such as critical conversations with colleagues and reflecting, mirror the kinds of engagement…

One of the challenges leaders face is how to help teachers examine their classroom practice. The use of video technology as a tool for teacher self-reflection, peer collaboration, and coaching has been gaining in popularity for just this purpose. In this article, the authors share how teachers benefit from using a Lesson Analysis Protocol to…

Purpose: The System for Observing Play and Recreation in Communities (SOPARC) is a valid, reliable method for understanding how people engage in physical activity (PA) in various permanent settings (e.g., parks) and contexts. However, its utility, reliability, and validity in temporary spaces has not been examined. Temporary spaces can provide PA…

One popular observational instrument to evaluate teaching is the Classroom Assessment Scoring System--Secondary (CLASS-S). Yet, the secondary version of the CLASS poorly discriminates classroom management quality beyond identifying extremely chaotic classrooms with teachers' scores clustering in the most positive ranges of effectiveness. Studies…

Screening for autism spectrum disorder is the first step toward early detection and diagnosis, thereby impacting the likelihood of children accessing early intervention and, importantly, improving long-term outcomes. This systematic review aimed to (a) establish a clear baseline of autism spectrum disorder screening tools currently used throughout…

Teachers' use of formative assessment (FA) has been shown to improve student outcomes; however, teachers enact FA in many ways. We examined classroom videos of nine experienced teachers of elementary, middle, and high school science, aiming to create a model of FA enactment that is useful to teachers. We developed a coding scheme through a…

This paper gives a grounded cognition account of model-based learning of complex scientific knowledge related to socio-scientific issues, such as climate change. It draws on the results from a study of high school students learning about the carbon cycle through computational agent-based models and investigates two questions: First, how do…

To improve the quality of our instruction and to contribute to student success, we designed an instructional development program using peer mentoring and observation grounded in evidence-based practices. We identified three methods of peer observation and mentoring to create an innovative progressively in-depth program that helps librarians…

Faculty peer observation has seen increasing uptake in recent years, in some cases as an alternative or supplement to student teaching evaluations. While many universities encourage faculty peer observation, it is not widely used in a formal way for formative assessment. This article outlines the development of a new faculty peer observation…

The expectations for engineers to solve complex, global issues are growing at rates that exceed current curricula in engineering education. Studies show that early career engineering students are not confident in their ability to innovate. In this paper, the authors investigated the innovation self-efficacy beliefs (i.e., questioning, observing,…

We tested the frequent assumption that the difficulty of word retrieval increases when a speaker is being observed and evaluated. We modified the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) so that participants believed that its evaluative observation components continued throughout the duration of a subsequent word retrieval task, and measured participants'…

Despite being a staple of academic life (or perhaps because it is so taken-for-granted), the academic conference has been generally under-utilised as a site for academic research. Using participant observation as its methodology, this article draws on a long career of conference attendance to present two iron laws of conferences which address the…

The last few decades abound in studies concerned with what teachers, students, parents, and other participants in the educational process believe about a wide variety of issues. Most of these studies follow methodological procedures based on reports that people make about their own beliefs. We argue that this strategy is seriously flawed under…

Tests, especially high-stakes ones, occupy a prominent role in education and impact on students' personal and professional trajectory. Therefore, it is crucial that they are well understood. Enhancing understanding of the workings of tests requires a multidisciplinary approach, one that treats tests not only as assessment instruments, but also as…

In this paper, we analyze mathematics lessons using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), a standardized observation protocol that suggests that high-quality lessons are distinguished by the tenor and frequency of classroom interactions. Because the CLASS focuses on interactions, rather than the specifics of content teaching, it can be…