Background: Teachers need to make sense of curricular materials and design instruction to ensure students will be positioned to pursue their own arc of inquiry in curriculum enactment. Whole-group discussions are crucial opportunities for curricular sensemaking, yet planning and enactment can be challenging. Methods: We used a single, revelatory…

Although educators are using various ways in evaluating students' learning, traditional paper pencil final exams are usually held at the end of the school year to conclude the course. During the school suspension due to the COVID-19 outbreak, this traditional approach is no longer applicable to some schools. In this article, alternative final…

The purpose of this mixed method nested case study is to: (a) provide indicators and experiences math educators have recognizing math anxiety in students; (b) identify ways in which middle and high school math educators implement creative teaching strategies to reduce math anxiety in middle and high school students; and (c) look at the veracity…

Educators manage student readiness for learning by applying models of instruction. The most common model used, however, is imprecise about cognitive operations. One way educators address this issue is with reflection, but reflection means many different things. An approach for narrowing reflection is to focus on metacognition. Literature has shown…

Purpose: This study aims to identify the main motivational factors that led practicing teachers to choose teaching as a profession in the United States and Turkey. Another purpose of this research is to investigate the possible significant difference between male and female teachers from the United States and Turkey considering motivational…

Research has demonstrated that on the path from a creative idea to a creative outcome, high creativity motivation and self-efficacy do not necessarily lead to creative behavior. The present study proposed and examined the notion that daily creativity planning could promote creative behavior and contribute to the cultivation of creativity. A total…

This article models how to plan and facilitate implementing the same task in two sixth-grade classrooms with two different learning goals using the Five Practices structure.

In this study, we investigated whether a colourful design would foster the aesthetic appreciation of Chinese classic poetry, and the role of learners' empathy trait in this process. Middle school students (N = 159) were assigned to one of four conditions in a 2 (Colour Design: Colourful vs. Grayscale) × 2 (Empathy Trait: High vs. Low)…

Assessment is usually considered as an afterthought in the instructional design process. Given the many challenges of assessment design--and the lack of ready solutions--teachers may fall back on familiar forms of assessments and hope for the best. As a result, the problem is not a lack of will on the part of teachers. Instead, it is the lack of…

Concerns about the disconnect between what goes on in teacher preparation programs and school classrooms have led to a greater emphasis on opportunities for preservice teachers to engage in the practice of teaching during their teacher education programs. Pedagogies of enactment have been shown to provide opportunities for preservice teachers to…

The paper reports an empirical study on the relationship between middle school students' understanding of nature of science (NOS) and their metacognitive awareness. The reconceptualised family resemblance approach to the nature of science (RFN) (Erduran & Dagher, 2014; Kaya & Erduran, 2016) as a holistic framework that covers science as…

Integer addition and subtraction entail significant conceptual shifts for many students, and teachers often offer rules intended to help mitigate this challenge. When these rules are not connected to sense making, a misremembered rule can function as a barrier to student learning. In this article, the authors highlight the work of an expert…

This study examined the relationship between mathematics achievement and epistemic actions. Cognitive actions that are observed as outcomes of using intellectual resources are referred to as epistemic actions in this study. We focused on four epistemic actions as follows: "selecting," "analyzing," "computing," and…

Learning to calculate the area of composite shapes is an important application of area measurement but evidence suggests that many middle school students struggle to calculate the area of even simple composite shapes. In this article, I report the findings of a classroom design study conducted to investigate the collective development of…

The paper presents a study that aimed to reveal the process quality descriptors of an argument-based inquiry approach. Process quality signifies whether a teacher is a better or unsatisfactory implementer of a version of in-class science inquiry. An experienced middle school science teacher was the participant. Based on the initial analysis…