We present results of an evaluation of the first year of a multi-year comprehensive middle school reading program. Four public middle schools in rural Virginia with large populations of students with limited reading proficiency participated in a study to determine the reading program's impact. We evaluated 235 students with low reading achievement…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) Practice Guide, "Teaching Secondary Students to Write Effectively," offers educators three specific, evidence-based recommendations that address the challenges of teaching students in grades 6-12 to write effectively. This summary focuses on the first of the three recommendations: Explicitly teach…

Background: The main purposes of visual arts education concern the enhancement of students' creative processes and the originality of their art products. Divergent thinking is crucial for finding original ideas in the initial phase of a creative process that aims to result in an original product. Aims: This study aims to examine the effects…

This study explored outcomes related to students' participation in a Houston Symphony (HS) partnership at a targeted HISD elementary school. Students received weekly in-school core enrichment instruction and after-school violin instruction by Houston Symphony Community-Embedded Musicians throughout the 2018-2019 academic year. The study found that…

Australian science curricula have promoted the use of investigations that allow secondary students to engage deeply with the methods of scientific inquiry, through student-directed, open-ended investigations over an extended duration. This study presents the analysis of data relating to the frequency of completion and attitudes towards long…

The purpose of the study was to determine the effect of two contrasting pedagogies (i.e., experiential learning and direct instruction) on students' retention of agricultural knowledge over time. A six-week deferred post-test was employed to assess long-term retention of the subject matter. The results indicated that initially, students who were…

The study investigated the preferred methods of teaching and learning English language among a sample of teachers and students from higher secondary schools in Bangalore, India. A total of 67 participants took part in this study which included 30 students (m=14, f=16) and 37 teachers (m=16, f=21). The Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) method…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to determine whether learning preferences of secondary students identified with concomitant learning disabilities (LD) and emotional disturbance (ED) align with the instructional method with which they best learned mathematics. Responses to a preference survey given before and after instruction were…

This study describes the development and initial psychometric evaluation of a Recognizing Effective Special Education Teachers (RESET) teacher observation instrument. Specifically, the study uses generalizability theory to compare two versions of a rubric, one with general descriptors of performance levels and one with item-specific descriptors of…

Traditional teacher education programs focus on pedagogy and, to a lesser extent, assessments of knowledge (Siedlecki, 2012). Pedagogy and assessments should be fundamental components of any secondary teacher's curriculum planning (Knight, Shum, & Littleton, 2014). This study sought to consider the possible effects of three pedagogical…

Various theoretical approaches propose that emotions in the classroom are elicited by appraisal antecedents, with subjective experiences of control playing a crucial role in this context. Perceptions of control, in turn, are expected to be influenced by the classroom social environment, which can include the teaching methods being employed (e.g.,…

When students read more, vocabulary knowledge increases (Cunningham & Stanovich, 2003; Krashen, 2004). Out of every 100 unknown words that students encounter while reading, they learn an average of 15 of them from text alone (Swanborn & de Glopper, 1999). In addition, as students age, they are more likely to infer word meanings, indicating…

This article describes the importance of vocabulary knowledge in adolescents' reading comprehension, particularly for students with disabilities. Students with stronger vocabularies tend to have better background knowledge and improved understanding of content-area texts. We describe evidence-based vocabulary instructional practices that…

The sociopolitical and economic structure of Nigeria is being threatened by youth incivility, while civic virtues in all spheres of life are gradually declining. This study examined the effects of the 5Es instructional strategy on the literacy scores of students in Civic Education. A research question was raised with the corresponding hypothesis.…

This educational white paper is being written in the wake of school closures resulting from the CoVid-19 pandemic. As the necessity for distance learning has become apparent in order to reduce the spread of CoVid-19, the burden of the education of school children has shifted from teachers to parents. In this white paper, the author examines the…