"Educating for Purposeful Life" documents positive change within the Anaheim Union High School District, whose overarching mission is to prepare high school graduates who possess a clear sense of purpose and the capacity to achieve their goals. Superintendent Michael Matsuda and education consultant David Brazer lay out the district's…

The notion of scientific visual literacy has been advocated in recent science curriculum reform documents and related learning outcomes are expected from students. However, few studies have been conducted to determine how it is tested in high-stakes examinations. This study utilized the Visualization Blooming Tool to examine the level of visual…

The authors recently studied how well schools were teaching a a range of complex, higher-order skills. Their findings were grim. Out of 25 skills that researchers have found to be critical to success in life and work, just three were the focus of most instruction: recall, application, and (occasionally) analysis. Even when teachers explicitly made…

The purpose of this study was to look at mission driven school district leadership in Massachusetts public schools and attempt to identify any relationship, or lack thereof, between district mission statements and student achievement. In this study, 288 Massachusetts public school districts are ranked according to their 2011 high school graduation…

Aim/Purpose: The purpose of the current study is to introduce a digital thinking skills (DTS) theoretical model (DTSM) that could support and enhance digital instruction best practices in schools. Methodology: We have taken a mixed-methods approach. Our respondents represent diverse cultural, linguistic, pedagogical, and social heritages.…

Attention has been focused for decades on the need to improve high school students' preparation for the workplace. Employers report that nearly half of their entry-level employees are inadequately prepared and lack basic communication and critical thinking skills as well as a work ethic. Although a postsecondary credential is considered necessary…

The main areas of difficulty experienced by those teaching and learning organic chemistry at high school and introductory university level in Ireland have been identified, and the findings support previous studies in Ireland and globally. Using these findings and insights from chemistry education research (CER), the Organic Chemistry in Action!…

This paper describes an exploratory study observing the use of "Minecraft" (a popular sandbox style online video game environment) in a high school English literature classroom. We use Piaget and Inhelder's (1969) constructivist theories about the formal operational stage of development to interpret the concepts of plot and…

This study sought to determine the beliefs that tenured, in-service high school science teachers hold about how their participation in a large mid-Atlantic university's 6-week summer research experiences for teachers (RET) program might influence their pedagogical practices. The findings show a number of factors that teachers believed helped them…

This paper presents research on the effects of a cognitive acceleration intervention in science lessons on low socioeconomic students in a government high school in regional Western Australia. "Thinking Science Australia" is a programme currently being implemented in Australian junior high school classes. The research was conducted for…

SProblem solving has a long and successful history in mathematics education and is valued by many teachers as a way to engage and facilitate learning within their classrooms. The potential benefit for using problem solving in the development of algebraic thinking is that "it may broaden and develop students' mathematical thinking beyond the…

What skills and competencies do high school students need to master for future success? And what can high schools do to develop these skills? Research on skills has tended to focus either on college readiness or on workplace readiness, often in isolation and frequently without reference to what the broader field of youth development tells us…

Youth programs that are organized around intellectually challenging, socially relevant projects create opportunities for deep cognitive engagement. One type of authentic project that deserves attention from applied developmental scientists is youth participatory action research (YPAR), in which participants study a problem relevant to young…

The Lawson Classroom Test of Scientific Reasoning (LCTSR) was used to gauge the relative effectiveness of three different methods of pedagogy, "Reading, Presenting, and Questioning" (RPQ), "Experimenting and Discussion" (ED), and "Traditional Methods" (TM), on increasing students' level of scientific thinking. The…

"Thinking Like a Historian" (TLH) is a tool for framing the past to teach students the elements of historical thinking while, at the same time, grounding students' knowledge of the past through inquiry and evidentiary support. The framework's design allows for a separation of the ways historians study the past from the ways historians organize…