The centrality of knowledge construction to student learning is well-recognised in education. In this study, we explore what it means to go beyond knowledge construction to knowledge evaluation, and how knowledge evaluation combined with direct disciplinary access improves opportunities for meaningful learning. We first review literature to…

Students do their best work when they have a sense of agency around science and science learning. Scientific practices like argumentation and critique are areas in which students' agency is especially visible, as they require many points of decision-making and evaluation. While argumentation and critique are fundamental practices in both classroom…

This manuscript describes the implementation of a co-created (teacher and researcher) unit of instruction focused on the teaching of war. This unit examines war through a critical lens and emphasizes anti-war movements. A design study this research investigated how the teaching of war as difficult knowledge can impact student sense of critical…

This study investigates the multimodal construction of blame attributions in peer interaction during digital tasks in English as a Foreign Language classrooms. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis (CA), we examine how the force of blamings is manifested in and through the variety of resources used, and the role of digital devices in the…

What should U.S. schools teach about U.S. actions abroad when students in the classroom have varied or conflicting memories, ideas, and experiences? Should schools teach the dominant narrative of U.S. benevolence and innocence in world affairs so as to instill patriotism in children? What kind of patriotism are we concerned with here? Or should…

We assessed the influence of genre-specific discourse knowledge and writing goals on the persuasive writing of 4th and 6th grade students with and without learning disabilities (LD). Students were first interviewed about their knowledge of persuasion and persuasive writing. They then wrote a persuasive essay about a controversial topic after…

Practicing teachers as well as researchers, mathematicians, and teacher educators have offered opinions and theoretical critiques of the multiple models used to teach integer arithmetic. Few studies, however, have investigated what students learn with models or empirically compared affordances and constraints of integer models. This led me to…

This case study focuses on the diverse discourses Latinx bilingual students bring to class to make sense of power relations in the world. The study implements critical literacy practices such as read-alouds, discussions, writing, and drawing activities that help students critique and disrupt power discourses embedded in texts and visuals. With the…

This study examined the effectiveness of instruction in a genre-specific reading comprehension strategy, "Critical Analysis of Argumentative Text" (CAAT), which was designed to help students to identify, summarize and critically analyze parts of argumentative text. Based on the premise that reading and writing require similar knowledge of text…

The goal of this study was to explore different strategies for coping with boredom. A questionnaire was developed targeting two dimensions of coping, namely approach versus avoidance oriented coping and cognitive versus behavioral oriented coping. First, based on the responses of 976 students (51% female) from grades 5 to 10, the structure of the…

In this article, Elizabeth Marshall and Kelleen Toohey use critical discourse analysis to examine educators' efforts to incorporate funds of knowledge from the communities and families of Punjabi Sikh students in a Canadian elementary school. Using MP3 players, students first recorded and then translated their grandparents' stories of life in…

The optimal school learning environment for gifted students is one where scholastic rigor is the standard. This rigor is needed both to stimulate the students intellectually and enhance their academic growth. The integration of critical thinking skills into the daily content and lessons is essential for achieving this rigor. This infusion, along…

Value-added modeling continues to gain traction as a tool for measuring teacher performance. However, recent research (Rothstein, 2009a, 2009b) questions the validity of the value-added approach by showing that it does not mitigate student teacher sorting bias (its presumed primary benefit). Our study explores this critique in more detail.…

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate self-criticism as a potential mediating factor in the link between mother-adolescent relationships with aggression and perceptions of social competence. The sample consisted of 888 older (M = 14.3 years) and younger (M = 11.6 years) adolescent children from the same family. Maternal…

Power Teaching weaves four factors into a seamless whole: standards, teaching thinking, research based strategies, and critical inquiry. As a prototype in its first year of development with an urban fifth grade class, the power teaching model connects selected district standards, thinking routines from Harvard University Project Zero Research…