National standards that centre on the underpinning epistemic practices of the discipline has emphasised the need for teachers to focus much more on knowledge generation approaches to learning. Adopting a complexity perspective, we attempt to understand how teachers shift over time by examining their epistemic orientation to knowledge generation…

Online courses supplemented by on-site facilitators help many rural students pursue advanced coursework, but research is warranted to better understand facilitator role and training needs. This study examined facilitation experiences, demographic characteristics, and professional development activities of rural on-site facilitators associated with…

Historically, there have been different types of instructional practice in education. Before the mid-1980s, administrators pushed content. In the mid-1980s, it was Effective Teaching with the Six-Point Lesson Plan. There were many observations with the Career Ladder of which the researcher was a participant in the pilot program. There came…

Purpose: Developing countries in many parts of the world have experienced a disturbing trend in the differential pace of economic development among urban and rural communities. These inequities have been observed in education systems in Asia, Africa, and Latin America where researchers have documented differences not only in resource allocation…

The U.S. government has stated in federal guidelines that parents must be involved in their children's education in order for student achievement to increase. For more than 5 years, a small rural middle school in Mississippi was designated a low-performing school due to its failure to achieve the required standards for quality distribution index…

Technology has reshaped conceptions of professional development by increasing access to information, enabling sustained follow-up efforts, and fostering teacher reflection and collaboration. Drawing on theoretical models of parent involvement and an ethic of caring, this study examined the perceptions and attitudes of educators toward…

This Statistics in Brief provides a snapshot of the state of teacher professional development activities among U.S. public school teachers using data collected through the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) Public School Teacher Questionnaire. This report relies on data provided by public school teachers about their professional…

This study examined the initial effects of a participatory-based, competency-/skill-building professional development workshop for physical education (PE) teachers on the use of physical activity (PA) promotion practices (e.g., eliminating lines, small-sided games) and students' moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA). A total of 823…

This study describes the implementation and effects of a 32-week teacher-led spatial reasoning intervention in K-2 classrooms. The intervention targeted spatial visualization skills as an integrated feature of regular mathematics instruction. Compared to an active control group, children in the spatial intervention demonstrated gains in spatial…

This research study investigated whether the effects of response to intervention impacted student achievement in a rural virtual high school, as well as sought to determine staff perceptions of the efficacy of the implementation of RTI within the school. The researcher used both quantitative and qualitative analysis to effectively answer the…

This study used action research to help improve technology use in teachers' classrooms through the use of information gained from research of technology use in the classroom. The teachers were asked to be responsible for development and implementation of their own learning through the use of personal professional development. Throughout the study…

Research in rural and remote schools and communities of Queensland resulted in the development and validation of the Rural and Remote Teaching, Working, Living and Learning Environment Survey (RRTWLLES). Samples of 252 teachers and 191 community members were used to validate the structure of this questionnaire. It was developed within the standard…

We evaluated a program to improve literacy instruction on the Kenyan coast using training workshops, semiscripted lesson plans, and weekly text-message support for teachers to understand its impact on students' literacy outcomes and on the classroom practices leading to those outcomes. The evaluation ran from the beginning of Grade 1 to the end of…

A workshop with virtual consultation practice-based professional development model for self-regulated strategy development persuasive writing instruction was evaluated in a randomized controlled trial. Nineteen general education teachers and 564 Grade 5 and 6 students in 16 low-wealth rural schools participated. Following training, teachers…

This paper explores the perceived professional development needs of inservice teachers of English-language learners (ELLs) from 10 rural and small districts in the USA. The survey instrument that captured responses from 159 elementary and secondary teachers in Texas was primarily quantitative and was based on the state English as a second language…