Mindfulness training contributes to greater well-being in students who encounter challenges that cause stress. Ongoing stress can be detrimental and have negative impacts on the brain, which results in academic and social difficulties. Mindfulness training can help protect the developing brain from the negative effects of excessive stress,…

This topic brief is one in a series on personalized learning prepared for Conversations with Innovators, 2018. Student voice is a critical element in implementing student-driven personalized learning. Yet it is one that is often marginalized or ignored. Student-driven personalization is a critical concept in the pursuit of a personalized learning…

This article explains how to create and use a daybook in the literacy classroom. Readers learn what a daybook is, how the daybook in one fourth and fifth grade classroom is structured, and how students in this classroom use that daybook during reading instruction to engage, record important information, and discuss a text.

Hopscotch, basketball, or hide-and-seek? Children have many choices at recess, and while making these choices they must consider and make trade-offs. The way they make these decisions is not that different from the thought processes engineers use when making design trade-offs. Engineers have to make trade-offs because a design that meets all…

Paraphrasing, somewhat different from retelling and summarizing, helps students monitor their understanding and incorporate new knowledge with what they already know about a topic. Paraphrasing helps students realize that comprehension is the goal of reading.

This article discusses a new design for the classic Bloom's Taxonomy developed by Anderson, L. W. & Krathwohl, D. (2001), which can be used to evaluate learners' technology-enhanced experience in more powerful and critical ways. The New Bloom's Taxonomy incorporates contemporary research on learning and human cognition into its model. The…

Research investigating how students who struggle with learning, as well as typically achieving students, can develop powerful self-regulation and academic strategies has become a major endeavor in both general and special education. In this article, we examine how one model of cognitive strategies instruction, Self-Regulated Strategy Development…

Reflection is a powerful means to involve readers actively in gaining new insights about texts and themselves as readers. This article relates the story of three fifth-grade girls engaged in metacognitive inquiry within a classroom book club group. The use of exploratory talk and reflection illustrate how the girls constructed meaning and deepened…

Writing samples from 21 fourth and fifth grade learning-disabled students illustrate three typical problems. The Cognitive Strategy Instruction in Writing program incorporates strategies for performing the writing process and for enhancing student awareness of the roles of audience and text structure in planning, organizing, writing, editing, and…

In self-regulated learning, metacognitive components are necessary but insufficient. There is a need for a strong learning intention which can compete with other goals, interests, and distracting stimuli. Task accomplishment is an important factor in continued motivation and intention. (JAZ)

In this essay, the author describes her experience with an experiential model of learning through teaching that gives college students the opportunity to use what they learn in the college classroom to develop curricula and then teach those curricula in an elementary school. Her specific experience was with a science course for non-science majors,…

The Indiana Weather Project (IWP) investigated how the joint application of situated learning and constructivist theory might support elementary school students' understanding of weather systems. Results indicated significant cognitive gains during the multimedia weather unit. (SD)