In this theoretical paper, we respond to a call for all Mathematics Education researchers to become equity researchers (Aguirre et al., 2017) by articulating how equity is foundational to making second-order models of students' mathematics. First, based on prior research, we view equity to be about power and respect. We define an act of equity as…

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development periodically surveys teaching and learning issues (the TALIS surveys) in the most developed countries. In their 2009 report, they commented that although teacher quality is the fundamental component in high performing systems, the education sector has been slow to develop systemic…

Educational researchers have increasingly paid attention to how practitioners can access and utilize research knowledge, but the field still has been unable to create a research tradition and corresponding diffusion model that directly and uniformly influences teachers' practice. One reason for this is the contested status of teaching as a…

Educational researchers and policy-makers are now expected by funding agencies and their institutions to innovate the multi-directional ways in which our production of knowledge can impact the classrooms of teachers (practitioners), while also integrating their experiential knowledge into the landscape of our research. In this article, we draw on…

Social work doctoral programs are not adequately preparing students to educate future clinical practitioners. Social work is predominantly a practice profession. Social work's PhD programs must continue the education of excellent researchers while also educating for excellence in practice, teaching, field liaison, and the supervision of practice.…

Mathematics teachers face a myriad of instructional obstacles. Since the early 1990s, mathematics education researchers have proposed the use of constructivist practices to counteract these ever-prevalent obstacles. While we do give credit to the choices of instructional activities the constructivist paradigm promotes, there are problems with its…

Recent elaborations on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) (Engestrom et al., eds., "Perspectives on activity theory." New York: Cambridge University Press, "1999") and its relation to organizational theories have produced a theoretical amalgam of these earlier ideas, which allow for the exploration of learning in formal…

Two related themes currently dominate discourse on open-access colleges, particularly community colleges: increasing college-going and degree attainment and improving the performance of postsecondary institutions with respect to producing graduates. Largely missing from this discourse, however, is cogency concerning the innumerable ways in which…

Most educational researchers have heard the adage, "If you want to measure change in performance, don't change the measure." At the same time, however, what students need to know and be able to do may change over time as research on teaching and learning provides new insights into the educational process, science and technology advance, and…

In many academic areas, students' success depends upon their ability to envision and manipulate complex multidimensional information spaces. Fields in which students struggle with mastering these types of representations include (but are by no means limited to) mathematics, science, medicine, and engineering. There has been some educational…

To provide an accurate reading of students' and schools' rates of progress, and to provide cues for instruction, assessment at every level should be connected to explicit learning goals and standards. To show how this requirement can be fulfilled, and how research-based assessment can effectively support learning and instruction, this article…

During the last four decades, educational researchers and practitioners have intensively engaged in bringing about positive changes in schools. Therefore, the kinds of changes introduced to schools have become complex in nature and overwhelming in number--from improving teacher professional knowledge base and teaching repertoires to developing…

The authors support role changes for educational practitioners who work with children and youth with disabilities as they make important transitions. Principles from critical pedagogy and disability studies are summarized to provide a new theoretical framework to support role changes. Rather than needs-based services that focus on helping those…

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of a false assumption regarding the motivation of examinees on test construction. Simulated data were generated using two models of item responses (the three-parameter logistic item response model alone and in combination with Wise's examinee persistence model) and were calibrated using a…

Background: Higher education researchers have much to say about the transition to college. This field focuses primarily on inequities in college participation and completion, the relative importance of high school preparation, and the utility of financial aid in promoting enrollment. This literature's strongest conceptual emphasis is on…