Each year, the Houston Independent School District (HISD) offers a summer education program designed to assist students with a variety of instructional needs. The 2015 summer education program allowed students the opportunity to repeat required courses needed for promotion, to get ahead by taking required courses before the next school year, or to…

Nowadays, outreach labs are important informal learning environments in science education. After summarizing research to goals outreach labs focus on, we describe our evidence-based gene technology lab as a model of a research-driven outreach program. Evaluation-based optimizations of hands-on teaching based on cognitive load theory (additional…

Throughout the history of education, it has been noted that teachers are influential people in lives of children (Applegate & Applegate, 2004; Daisey, 2010; Gambrell, 1996; Ruddell, 1995). Children spend one-third (or more) of the day with teachers; and as they enter into adolescence, children come in contact with more and more teachers during…

This paper reports on an evaluation of a distinctive university-school partnership program, Curriculum Bridges. Curriculum Bridges aims to develop the enthusiasm and capacity of students from disadvantaged schools in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). These objectives are sought by developing a theme in the…

This paper examines the results of the repeated administration of the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) in a large introductory physics course at a midsize, metropolitan Canadian university. We compare the results to those obtained previously in comparable courses at the University of British Columbia (Canada) and the…

The modern world is becoming increasingly digitalised and this is affecting the way in which humans not only live but also learn. In South Africa, the majority of students entering universities are from disadvantaged backgrounds and come from schools and communities in which they were not exposed to the same technologically rich environments as…

This report presents Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) examination participation and performance results in Texas public schools for the 2012-13 and 2013-14 school years. Data are provided by student characteristics, including race/ethnicity; gender; and economic, atrisk, English language learner, immigrant, and migrant…

The country's technological edge is receding, and the problem cannot be solved simply by flooding the workforce with more engineers and scientists. This comes as little surprise to administrators at the nation's community colleges. In 2007, the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Science, and the Institute of Medicine responded to…

The School Choice Demonstration Project has published a series of reports written in the fifth and final year of its evaluation of the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP). This review is of Report #30, a final follow up to a five-year study examining high school graduation and post-secondary enrollment rates for students participating in the…

This paper discusses a K-12/university collaboration in which students participated in a four-day scenario-based summer STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) camp aimed at making difficult scientific concepts salient. This scenario, Jumpstart STEM-CSI: Chocolate Science Investigation (JSCSI), used open- and guided-inquiry…

A focused scientific research effort on writing research and its relationship to language development and reading is needed to address the writing and broader literacy needs of today's and tomorrow's learners and workers. In the United States, as well as in many other nations, research on writing has been neglected in relation to the emphasis on…

Project Lead the Way (PLTW) is a hands-on, project-based engineering curriculum for high school and middle school students, which has quadrupled annual enrollment in Texas in five years to over 23,000 students. The diversity of students participating has also increased dramatically. Using six years of longitudinally-linked student data, the…

Nearly all high school seniors plan college, but many low-income students do not enroll. Moreover, among students who do enroll, low-income students often pursue less dependable college pathways. While research typically focuses on college cost and academic preparation as explanations of socioeconomic differences in enrollment outcomes, other…

This study examines a project through which elementary school and high school students collaborated with university Architecture/New Media students in building models of virtual, immersive libraries. It presents the project in the context of multiple and cross-disciplinary fields currently investigating the use of virtual and immersive…

This study was designed to enhance our understanding of the changing relationship between low- and high-level writing processes in the course of development. A dual description of writing processes was undertaken, based on (a) the respective time courses of these processes, as assessed by an analysis of eye and pen movements, and (b) the semantic…