The present study investigates the impact of the educational game Sociopolis on student engagement in the context of tenth-grade social science education. Employing a mixed-methods approach, this research examines engagement behaviors quantitatively and categorically. The participant pool consists of 183 students from four public schools in…

An investigation was conducted to help weak academic English learners in a public high school in Colombia, as they seemed to be facing a learning specific difficulty called dyslexia. A focus group of ten students from ninth and tenth grade was the beneficiaries of the design, implementation, and assessment of five multisensory activities to help…

This paper reports on an action-research study aimed at identifying the problems and needs of a specific group of tenth graders at a school in Colombia in relation to their reading comprehension in English in order to design, partially implement, and evaluate a genre-oriented syllabus. Findings show that the explicit instruction of metacognitive…

This article reports the results of an action-research project focused on improving students' communicative competence in English through the task-based learning approach. This study was conducted in a co-educational public school in Medellín (Colombia) with thirty-four tenth graders. Actions implemented include the development of a series of…

This action research examines experiences that students in a grade 10 EFL class had with redesigning a grammar-unit into a topic-based unit. Strategies were formulating significant learning goals and objectives, and implementing and reflecting on activities with three dimensions of Dee Fink's (2003) taxonomy of significant learning: the human…

This article reports on an action research project conducted in a public school in Bogotá, Colombia, with tenth grade students. We decided to develop it because of the students' needs as well as the em phasis of the PEI (Proyecto Educativo Institucional = School Institutional Project), which is based on the requisite of improving reading…

Surveyed 10th graders from 32 Colombian public schools to examine risk behaviors related to depression and suicide. About 21 percent of respondents expressed suicidal feelings. This transcended to actual plans in 19 percent of respondents, while 16 percent reported at least one attempt in the previous 30 days. Suicidal thoughts and attempts…

Investigated health behaviors practiced by 10th graders in Bogota, Colombia. Data from a modified version of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey indicated that there was a high use of gateway substances (tobacco and alcohol) among respondents, but lower usage, when compared to U.S. students, of other mind-altering substances such as marijuana,…