A Fully Integrated Educational System practices collaborative learning among all peers. The study summarized in this report (Zhang, X., Anderson, R. C., Morris, J., Miller, B., Nguyen-Janiel, K. T., Lin, T., Zhang, J., Jadallah, M., Scott, T., Sun, J., Latawjec, B., Ma, S., Grabow, K., & Hsu, J. Y. (2016). "Improving children's competence…

This research examined the influence of contrasting instructional approaches on children's decision-making competence. A total of 764 fifth graders, mostly African Americans and Hispanic Americans, from 36 classrooms in eight public schools serving children from low-income families completed a six-week unit on wolf management, using either direct…

Science includes more than just concepts and facts, but also encompasses scientific ways of thinking and reasoning. Students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds influence the knowledge they bring to the classroom, which impacts their degree of comfort with scientific practices. Consequently, the goal of this study was to investigate 5th grade…

A critical component of science is the role of inquiry and argument in moving scientific knowledge forward. However, while students are expected to engage in inquiry activities in science classrooms, there is not always a similar emphasis on the role of argument within the inquiry activities. Building from previous studies on the Science Writing…

In this article, the author describes her use of direct instruction to introduce the skill of determining source reliability in a fifth-grade unit on immigration in American history. She structures instruction to help students establish a thinking-skill strategy that results in not only an understanding of immigration in the late 1800s to early…