Algebra I encompasses several topics that serve as a basis for students' subsequent mathematics courses as they progress in school. Some of the key topics that students struggle with is solving linear equations and algebraic word problems. There are several factors that may contribute to this ongoing struggle for students such as the structure of…

Urban school districts have seen low scores on NWEA Map math scores (Education Recovery Scoreboard, 2024). To foster and promote urban youths' capabilities to learn mathematics, a new method to teach, enhance, and remediate understanding of fractions was developed, Fractions and Signed Numbers Workshop (FracSi). It utilizes the approach of an…

Past research suggests that a sense of belonging to a community is developmentally important for adolescents and affects their engagement in school, especially during the transition to high school. However, little research examines the teaching practices that simultaneously foster classroom belonging and behavioral engagement to create a classroom…

Mathematical modeling is a challenging and creative process. If one considers only interim or final solutions to modeling problems or interviews modelers afterward, often only their "explicit" models are accessible -- those expressed in work products or evinced in verbal and written reflections. The inner world of tacit knowledge and its…

There is growing concern that it is too difficult or costly to substantially improve the academic skills of children who are behind in school once they reach adolescence. But perhaps what we have tried in the past relies on the wrong interventions, failing to account for challenges like the increased variability in academic needs during…

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…

Secondary school students often only use the rules for doing scientific inquiry when prompted, as if they fail to see the point of doing so. This qualitative design study explores conditions to address this problem in school science inquiry. Dutch students (N = 22, aged 14-15) repeatedly consider the quality of their work: in a conventional,…

This study was a yearlong investigation over writing instruction with one class of ninth grade students in an urban, "underperforming" high school. Using qualitative methods with embedded quantitative features, findings revealed students benefited little from the writing instruction they received. In fact, most students showed virtually…

Theater-based approaches have been implemented globally as a health education and behavior change strategy for decades. Studies have shown that live theater performances can engage an audience and influence the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of audience members. Moreover, literature has shown that adolescents find theater-based interventions…

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of the social and cultural instructional process on independent reading. In addition, the purpose of this study was to examine the effect of the administrator-teacher relationship on educational practices in a lab site classroom. Using an action research design, data was collected through…

We present an analysis of three 9th grade integrated mathematics lessons in which a group of teachers and researchers redesigned a sequence of lessons with the goal of engaging a linguistically diverse group of students in productive and powerful discussions (Herbel-Eisenmann et al. 2013). The three lessons were part of a design experiment. Two…

This study compared the effectiveness of Orton Gillingham (OG) tutoring and National Institute for Learning Development Educational Therapy (NILD). A randomized controlled trial using 27 participants determined whether academic and cognitive outcomes differed between the groups over a 9-month period. Participants had designated learning…

Language ideologies profoundly shape and constrain the use of language as a resource for learning in 'multilingual' or linguistically diverse classrooms. In this paper, we draw attention in particular to the ideology of languages as stable, boundaried objects and to the colonial invention of African languages. Against this backdrop, we analyse an…

This study examined the effectiveness of the iPad app Mathspace on high school students' algebra computation and skill maintenance. The participants in this study were four ninth grade students enrolled in beginning algebra at a large, urban high school. All four students were struggling to obtain grade-level algebra skills and were reported by…

High-quality measures of instructional practice are essential for research and evaluation of innovative instructional policies and programs. However, existing measures have generally proven inadequate because of cost and validity issues. This paper addresses two potential drawbacks of survey self-report measures: variation in teachers'…