Facilitating meaningful discourse directly supports what students should be able to do with respect to the third of the eight Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP 3) in the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics (NGA Center and CCSSO 2010): "Construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others" (p. 6). Following best…

This paper describes the work done by sixth grade students to achieve and sustain productive and personally meaningful lines of inquiry with computational models. The capacity to frame interactions with tools as dialogic exchanges with co-participants is a productive practice for disciplinary engagement in science and for computational thinking…

Purpose of this study is determined effects of different teaching approaches on programming skills. Therefore, the effect of three different types of activities prepared with Scratch on 423 sixth grade students' attitudes towards computer technologies, algorithmic thinking skills and reflective thinking skills on problem solving were investigated.…

Recent research has argued that inquiry-based science learning should be guided by providing the learners with support. The research on guidance for inquiry-based learning has concentrated on how providing guidance affects learning through inquiry. How guidance for inquiry-based learning could promote learning about inquiry (e.g. epistemic…

This article describes the practices the authors use to promote learning mathematics through social interactions that they cultivate in their classrooms throughout the year. The design of their instruction is guided by two productive discourse practices that they have found to be the most powerful. The first practice involved posing open…

This article explores facilitating meaningful mathematics discourse, one of the research-based practices described in "Principles to Actions: Ensuring Mathematical Success for All." Two tools that can support teachers in strengthening their classroom discourse are discussed in this, another installment in the series.

The purpose of the present study was to assess the effects of a professional development program on sixth grade teachers' use of social dynamics management (SDM) practices. SDM practices represent teachers' active attempts to incorporate classroom social dynamics into everyday instructional and behavior management strategies. Sixth grade teachers…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study is to examine how 3rd-8th grade teachers describe their use of educational technology for experiential learning in mathematics in the Southwestern United States. David Kolb et al. (2001) experiential learning theory guided the two research questions on the level of use and how teachers described…

The overall purpose of this dissertation was to examine how school climate, leadership, and teachers' belief systems are interrelated and how they jointly influence teachers' classroom practices and students' learning and development. This dissertation is structured as follows. In chapter 1, the overarching themes of the dissertation are…

Administration and ministers of elementary schools located in the target district in the Caribbean reported that some elementary teachers were inconsistently implementing differentiated instruction (DI) in their practice. Based on the identified problem, it was unclear which specific strategies of DI were causing teachers to experience barriers or…

Through their work on the Fractions Project, Steffe and Olive (2010) identified a progression of fraction schemes that describes students' development toward more and more sophisticated ways of operating with fractions. Although several quantitative studies have affirmed this progression, the question has remained open as to whether it is specific…

While we have known about the benefits of project-based learning for decades, it has been difficult to maintain momentum in learning how to do it well, especially as the policy context in education turned toward high-stakes accountability measures in the early 2000s. Currently, many schools across the country are incorporating project-based…

Despite the growing body of research on how to support older readers, few studies consider whether U.S. teachers can identify students who have difficulty reading instructional materials across content areas or whether teachers feel like they have the knowledge and resources to support those students. Such information could lay the groundwork for…

Multilingualism is often associated with advantages for acquiring additional languages. Theoretical approaches explain these advantages by assuming a Common Underlying Proficiency or a Metalinguistic Awareness. At the State Europe School in Berlin, students from different language backgrounds receive instruction in German and a partner language…

This study used robot-based practices to develop an activity that incorporated the 6E model. The sixth-grade students learned interdisciplinary knowledge about how to use Arduino electronic components, microcontrollers, and hands-on tools to make a "Crab Robot." In addition, the students learned how to use Scratch programming language to…