The Common Core State Standards for English language arts expect that teachers will use narrative and informational texts to teach content area material across the curriculum. However, many teachers at all grade levels struggle to incorporate both kinds of text, especially given the vast amount of specialized content they are required to teach.…

In this brief article, Christina Kuriacose provides four sample performance assessments. Spanning grade levels, these assessments are strong examples of teacher-developed performance assessments from schools within the Center for Collaborative Education's Quality Performance Assessment network. These performance tasks demonstrate the pedagogical…

This paper explores the relation between formative assessment principles and their analogues in video games that game designers have been developing over the past 35 years. We identify important parallels between the two that should enable effective and efficient use of well-designed video games in the classroom as part of an overall learning…

This report provides a content comparison for the 2002 Series GED® test and the current GED® for the following test topic areas: (1) Mathematical Reasoning; (2) Reasoning through Language Arts; (3) Science; and (4) Social Studies.

The goal of this study is to examine the influence of a collaborative small-group discussion approach on students' social self-efficacy and class relationships. This approach, called Collaborative Social Reasoning (CSR), was informed by the substantial literature on Collaborative Reasoning (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001) and…

This study explores how two elementary teachers (first and fifth grades) integrated social studies content and skills throughout their school day. More specifically, we describe and explain their attempts at "stealthy" social studies instruction. Drawing on ideas of fractured, healthy, and stealthy integration (Hinde, 2015), we spent 26…

This exploratory study investigates English education professors' beliefs about the economic value of studying English language arts (ELA). In response to a 44-item, cross-sectional survey, 140 professors clarified their beliefs about which economic benefits are and should be offered in high school ELA classes; how ELA classes are and should be…

The author argues that English teachers are in a unique position to respond to death through writing, reading, and speaking. She describes four experiences and offers specific, language-based responses guided by experience and literature.

In the past years, data shows that the performance of students in the Philippines in the National Achievement Tests (NAT) across subjects remain to be way below the target of the Department of Education. This, along with the introduction of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) integration pushed the Philippine government to implement…

Cross-disciplinary self-studies and peer coaching have separately been shown to offer teacher educators meaningful professional development opportunities. However, the teacher educator literature has said little about combining cross-disciplinary self-studies with peer coaching. In this article, the authors report a two-year cross-disciplinary…

The study explores how literacy sponsorship (Brandt, 2001) is constructed in a United States rural region by focusing on the discourse of rural teachers and students. Data included interviews with teachers and students, classroom observations, an environmental print literacy scan, and analysis of community and classroom-based texts. A multi-cycle…

This article begins with a historical exploration of the U.S.'s implementations and usages of K-12 standardized testing, including efforts at and failures to promote educational equity. Then, centering teachers' voices, the authors use a dialogic narrative format to put two long-time friends and educators in conversation with one another and their…

For high school students with disabilities, one major component of learning in inclusive content area classes, such as English/language arts (ELA), involves listening to verbal information and recording notes. Learning how to record verbal information in notes is a critical skill for students to succeed in these classes. Therefore, this study…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" identifies argumentation as a central practice, and, subsequently, energizes teachers to develop students' capacity to write well-reasoned arguments and support their claims with relevant evidence. These skills now expected in the science classroom have long been central to instruction in…

Due to the Common Core State Standards, close reading is becoming a common practice in today's elementary and middle school classrooms. Qualitative content analysis of journal publications was used to determine the (a) prevalence of close reading in the existing literature, (b) knowledge about close reading from the research literature, (c) themes…