Much research has noted the misalignment between kindergarten through 12th grade (K-12) academic standards and curriculum materials used in classrooms. Many states and education organizations have been pushing for greater use of standards-aligned curriculum, especially during the past several years. In this report, the authors share results…

Research has highlighted the significant decline in teachers' implementation of newly acquired teaching practices following professional development (PD), primarily attributed to the absence of follow-up support. Even science teachers who have participated in intensive PD programs often encounter challenges in integrating new teaching practices…

The Early Learning Guidelines: Nebraska's Birth to Five Learning and Development Standards (hereafter referred to as the Guidelines) is a resource to provide information about young children's learning and development. The Guidelines are intended to assist adults in planning and providing meaningful learning experiences and environments for…

The Soil Nutrient Relationships course serves juniors and seniors with a major or minor in agronomy at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Pre-pandemic enrollment averaged 65 students. In 2021 and 2022, course enrollment was 42 and 55, respectively. The course was adjusted to a flipped design in 2017. Moving into 2021, the Soil Nutrient…

New national and state science standards are different than those of the past. These new standards incorporate three dimensions in each performance expectation. Due to the recent release of Nebraska's College and Career Ready Standards for Science and lack of curricula resources available, school districts and teachers need quality models for…

Attracting a general audience to STEM topics can be a challenge, and developing engaging and interactive instruction is important for educators in all fields. While many chemical educators have successfully used pop-culture themes to introduce their students to scientific concepts, these encounters are largely limited to formal classroom…

The topic of this study is professional development (PD) on Web 2.0 technologies for foreign language teachers and integration of these tools into the language classroom. This research explored the experiences of eighteen teachers of Spanish in grades 7-12 from both rural and urban areas in Nebraska, United States, who participated in a…

This resource provides parents with widely held expectations for their child's development prior to kindergarten and ways parents can encourage their child's growth. Although a child's growth and development follows a general pattern, all children grow at different rates. Some children will be doing things earlier or later than others. There's no…

At our predominantly white university, students often shy away from controversial conversations. How can the classroom encourage students to value and engage in potentially explosive conversations? We develop a concept of "empathic scaffolding" to articulate an approach that integrates diversity and inclusion into the classroom. Empathic…

Practitioner knowledge, as the center for change in teacher education, is the heart of The Carnegie Project of the Educational Doctorate (CPED) program. Margaret Lata and Susan Wunder explain a key principal of CPED is to grow practitioners as change agents, through the development of a Problem of Practice. In their article, Investing in the…

The statistical preparation of in-service teachers, particularly middle school teachers, has been an area of concern for several years. This paper discusses the creation and delivery of an introductory statistics course as part of a master's degree program for in-service mathematics teachers. The initial course development took place before the…

This publication highlights how state policies and guidance are supporting the transformation to personalized learning through digital instructional materials. Specifically, the report includes personalized learning approaches and the policies and processes around the selection, curation, procurement, professional learning and funding of digital…

Today, English language learners (ELLs)--students whose primary language is other than English--are the fastest-growing major school population in the United States. Between 2000-01 and 2010-11, the number of these students, whose level of English proficiency is not sufficient to support learning in a regular English language classroom, rose 18…

This article focuses on the grade-level outcomes to be assessed on middle school (grades 6-8) physical education. Specifically, the article describes how to teach basic tactics and strategies while applying fundamental movement patterns to the various game and movement categories (invasion, net/wall, target, fielding/striking, dance/rhythms, &…

This toolkit, developed by Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Central in collaboration with York Public Schools in Nebraska, provides a process and tools to help teachers use data from their classroom assessments to evaluate promising practices. The toolkit provides teachers with guidance on how to deliberately apply and study one classroom…