Educators aim to equip students with learning strategies they can apply when approaching new problems on their own. Teaching design-thinking strategies may support this goal. A first test would show that the strategies are good for learning and that students spontaneously transfer them beyond classroom instruction. To examine this, we introduce…

Digital books or e-books have revolutionized the way we access books and information. Students no longer spend hours paging through books at the library to gather information in order to write a paper. Now, they turn to a computer, tablet, or other mobile devices and search the Web. As we continue into the twenty first century, schools are being…

This case study explores what it is like for culturally and linguistically diverse adolescents who are low-income English Language Learners to experience garden-based education at their school's Learning Gardens in southeast Portland, Oregon, even as they and their families--driven from their homelands as immigrants and refugees--try to establish…

With the introduction of digital tools and online connectivity in primary schools, the shape of teaching and learning is shifting beyond the physical classroom. Drawing on the architecture of productive learning networks framework, we examine the affordances and limitations of an upper primary learning network and focus on how the digital and…

The objectives of the research reported in this article were to develop and evaluate an interdisciplinary primary school Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) curriculum as a collaboration among the subject areas of "kateika" (Japanese home economics), art, and music. In our curriculum, which focused on the improvement of…

This study was presented at the American Educational Research Association 2012 conference in Vancouver, Canada. The study explored how action research of arts-based teaching (ABT) impacted at-risk students in three urban public schools in southern California, USA. ABT was defined as using arts, music, drama, and dance in teaching other subjects. A…

Youth rarely receive opportunities to craft their own strategies around health and wellness within contexts relevant to them. From 2009 to 2010, the Institute of Play, based in New York, developed Being Me, a social networking site, to enable sixth-graders at the Quest to Learn public school to explore, discover and document a range of ideas…

Middle school teachers tend to rely heavily on texts that have become increasing more visual. There is little information available about the graphical demands of general middle grades' science texts. The purpose of this study was to quantify the type and quality of the graphical representations and how they interacted with the textual material in…

This study reports middle school astronomy classes that implemented photographs and classroom response systems (CRSs) in a discussion-oriented pedagogy with a curriculum unit for the topics of "day-night" and "cause of seasons." In the new pedagogy, a teacher presented conceptual questions with photographs, her 6th grade…

A brief look at how one sixth-grade class produced its own photo-stories as an exercise in visual literacy. (AK)

Picturing Peace is an ArtsBridge collaboration in which K-12 students learn to use digital cameras to communicate their feelings and ideas about peace. The photographs of three student cultures were analyzed. Both local and universal symbols of peace were found, such as nature, light, community, environment, peace signs, play, spiritual symbols,…

As a part of the teacher licensure program at the graduate level at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga (UTC), the M.Ed. Licensure candidate is required to complete an action research project during a 3-semester-hour course that coincides with the 9-semester-hour student teaching experience. This course, Education 590 Culminating…