Students from marginalized and underserved groups have historically faced difficulties in learning mathematics. It is crucial to tap into the skills and creativity of such learners as it would positively impact our society. To cater to the needs of these learners, different mathematical pedagogies and initiatives are being implemented.…

Students with significant support needs (SSN) have often been denied the breadth and depth of literacy instruction compared to their nondisabled peers. However, exposure to academic literacy increases when students with SSN are educated with their peers without disabilities within inclusive settings. While exposure is the first step to accessing…

This qualitative research examines design failure within a 5th grade science classroom that embedded engineering design activities. In adhering with a situative learning perspective, the goal of this research was to understand how design failure was portrayed to students through the written and enacted curriculum and in turn, how students…

This study was designed to introduce specific activities/lessons to students in an online university gender and communication course. It was also designed to determine how participants made meaning of and felt about learning about intersectionality of gender and cultural identities, using arts-based data collection. Previous research on the…

According to the National Council of Teacher of Mathematics (NCTM) (2000), K-12 students should be given an opportunity to develop their spatial reasoning abilities. One of the topics that may allow students to develop their spatial skills is forming 3-dimensional objects using spinning and extrusion methods. Also, extrusion and spinning methods…

Many people want to learn a foreign language, but issues of time, convenience and cost mean that classes are often insufficient for learners, and increasingly learners are supplementing or replacing their classroom learning with online learning. The majority of existing online language learning systems use the traditional grammar-translation…

How do children use physical and virtual tools to develop new numerical knowledge? While concrete instructional materials may support the delivery of novel information to learners, they may also over-simplify the task, unintentionally reducing learners' performance in recall and transfer tasks. This reduction in testing performance may be…

Physical science is important for developing scientific literacy yet a majority of teachers responsible for physical science courses do not have an academic degree in physical science. Programs aimed at increasing teacher content knowledge can be time consuming. This dissertation examines the impact of an inquiry based, professional development…

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the potential of Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) pedagogy to support English language learners (ELLs) in enhancing their meaning making potential as they engage in persuasive writing practices within academic contexts. The dissertation results from a teacher action research project in which the…