Over the last fifteen years, student well-being has become of greater concern in school education in Canada and beyond. However, there is very little data available on how well Canadian students are. The study that will be reported on in this paper provides such data, specifically the province of Manitoba. Using the Satisfaction with Life Scale,…

Background: Mental disorders most likely manifest during adolescence, providing opportunities for schools and professionals to implement standardized mental health literacy (MHL) interventions to support improvement of mental health outcomes. Purpose: This study aimed to evaluate the impact of an MHL intervention (the Guide) on knowledge, stigma,…

Actively engaging adolescents in meaningful program evaluation is a topic of growing interest. One possibility for such engagement is the use of photographs as part of visual evaluation, so that youth can directly engage with the research process. In this Method Note, we describe the development and implementation of a participatory, photo-based…

In this article, classroom researcher Harrison Campbell recounts his research into the literacy experiences of eight junior high (grades 8 and 9) students over the course of a school semester in Western Canada. Using phenomenological inquiry, Campbell invited students into a process of making meaning through experience. These experiences, brought…

Adolescents develop skills and ideas from their interest-driven practices, which shape a type of literacy that may differ from the traditional ideas of literacy. This paper takes a qualitative approach to identify adolescents' activities through interest-driven participatory design. We interacted with grade 9 students at a Western Canadian school…

Educators and parents alike have high expectations that adolescents behave prosocially and, within the context of schools, this is evident in curriculum grounded in social and emotional learning and in kindness-themed school-wide initiatives. Despite this emphasis on kindness, relatively little is empirically known about how adolescents enact…

The Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) is an international, non-profit educational organization. The Association's purpose is to advance the knowledge, theory, and quality of teaching and learning at all levels with information technology. The "EdMedia + Innovate Learning" conference took place in New York,…

The purpose of this research was to identify conflicts in the rights and responsibility of Grade 9 test takers when some parts of a large-scale test are marked by teachers and used in the calculation of students' class marks. Data from teachers' questionnaires and students' questionnaires from a 2009-10 administration of a large-scale test of…

This study examines the summative-assessment practices used for a one-to-one programme where all teachers and students in grades 7 to 9 across an entire district were provided with iPads. Data were gathered from 61 teachers who participated in a blended-learning case study. This article addresses how the presence of one-to-one technology, in the…

This study involved a group of 61 teachers in Ontario, Canada, who participated in a case study about classroom assessment practices. The participants were part of a district one-to-one technology programme that provided an iPad to each student and teacher in all Grade 7 to 9 classrooms. As part of the programme and its evaluation, teachers who…

Current thinking encourages teachers to incorporate a range of assessment practices that are responsive to student thinking and promote student learning. At the same time, teachers are situated in a landscape of accountability, where they are often seen as technicians who implement prescribed curriculum, policies, and procedures with success…

To date, extensive research has been done on the use of Audience Response Systems (ARSs) in colleges and universities, but not in secondary school schools. The purpose of this study was to conduct a detailed formative analysis on the benefits, challenges, and use of ARSs from the perspective of 659 secondary school students. Key benefits reported…

Cooperation between English as a second or other language (ESOL) and content-area teachers, often difficult to achieve, is hard to assess linguistically in a revealing way. This article employs register analysis (which is different from, but complementary to, genre analysis) in a Systemic Functional Linguistic perspective to show how an ESOL…

This study examined the performance of the FAS II in a general population of 17,545 students in grades 7, 9, 10 and 12 in the Atlantic provinces of Canada. The FAS II was assessed against two other measures of socioeconomic status: mother's highest level of education and family structure. Our study found that the FAS II reduces the likelihood of…

This article examines the complex task of designing a large-scale assessment to align with a reform-oriented view of mathematics teaching and learning. Specifically, we address this issue through the case of the province of Ontario that has a reform-oriented curriculum and support for its implementation. The province also has a mandate to assess…