Many students rely on rote algorithms that have been recently taught as they look for a direct way to tackle challenging problems. Especially for students who have not succeeded in the typical high-school curriculum, problem-solving in a novel situation is complex, and students ask for a direct way to solve rather than persevering. The purpose of…

Challenges associated with reading in the disciplines are well documented. In this article, we report on a small-scale study that was part of a larger school-university design-based research collaboration focused on improving literacy learning in Australian high schools. We discuss Paired Wide Reading (PWR), an instructional innovation designed to…

The purpose of this phenomenological study was to examine how the application of the community cultural wealth model can help raise the capacity of first-generation Latino at-promise youth towards finding greater educational success in a secondary school setting. Participants included first generation Latino at-promise students and their parents…

Researchers Martha Abele Mac Iver, Joyce Epstein, and Steven Sheldon summarize the outcomes of their four-year partnership with an urban district aimed at improving the ways schools engage families during the critical transition to high school. They describe how schools put into practice the strategies learned in ongoing professional development,…

Based on existing empirical research, schools continue to use single intervention programs for intervening on behalf of at-risk students despite the fact that those programs do not meet with significant success in decreasing dropout rates. The problem is that the phenomenon of multidimensional approaches to intervening on behalf of ninth-grade…

The purpose of this study is to determine how home visits conducted by teachers from a diverse, urban high school impacted student success and relationships between parents and teachers. Participants were high school teachers who were invited to conduct home visits for rising ninth graders and the students visited at home. In this mixed methods…

Background: This case study examined the consequences of a literacy initiative designed to improve writing instruction for a high school under pressure to increase standardised test scores or face government oversight. Realities of underperforming schools, such as interruptions to instructional time, a focus on formulaic essay writing and…

In this study, I explored how (a) a team-based instructional method rather than a one-teacher-one-classroom, traditional teaching model and (b) an inquiry-based learning approach affected teachers attitudes and self-efficacy for teaching and students attitudes, self-efficacy, engagement, and connections to school. The study was conducted within…

According to the author, English classrooms across the country have the potential to be the incubators we need to repair public discourse. Through traditional and innovative strategies, the author states, we can begin to rebuild our national conversation from the ground up, letting students take the lead while guiding them along their journey…

This paper presents the results of a partnership between a New Jersey school district and four-year university seeking to enhance STEM programming for the district's diverse student population. The project utilized a STEM-focused experiential unit integrated into existing ninth grade school non-science classes (social studies and career readiness…

A university geology department partnered with a STEM-focused high school to introduce project-based learning-centered geoscience content at the ninth-grade level. We hypothesized that these students, already interested in science, would be a natural recruitment pool into geoscience. Because they are enrolled by lottery, their demographics match…

This study aims to answer whether there is a relation between various competition games played in ELT (English Language Teaching) classrooms and sympathetic tendency of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners towards English lesson. The study was carried on 302 participants consisting of 9th grade students from a high school, Gaziantep. The…

This case study focuses on one district's process of continuous improvement in family engagement. The improvement effort addresses the point at which family engagement tends to decline precipitously and students are particularly vulnerable--the transition into high school. In this article we analyze the implementation of a continuous improvement…

Because there has been very little past research into gifted students' science learning environments, especially in Singapore, we selected from four established questionnaires six learning environment scales that are consistent with Van Tassel-Baska and Stambaugh's guidelines for gifted education. These scales were modified slightly to enhance…

Purpose: The purpose of this two-year study was to assess the impact of the CORE program, a model that integrates technology and active learning modules in high schools by providing multi-disciplinary teams of teachers and administrators with professional development and resources to support the development of students' non-cognitive skills and…