In "Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms" (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti x), a group of K-12 educators conducted ethnographic work on the home lives of their working-class students. With the premise that people are "competent, they have knowledge and their life experiences have given them…

Academic skill development requires engagement in effortful academic behaviors. Although students may be more likely to choose to engage in behaviors that require less effort, they also may be motivated to complete assignments that they have already begun. Seventh-grade students (N = 88) began a mathematics computation worksheet, but were stopped…

We describe the Situated Activity System of finishing craft assignments in preschool: the specific, routinized way that child and teacher jointly close the child's craft assignment, employing a specific discourse pattern. We analyzed the interactions of 14 Dutch children between 2.1 and 3.10 years old while they were finishing their craft…

Marketing students expect feedback on papers and assignments; and many professors expend much time and effort providing individualized and substantive comments in response to student work. Doing so is challenging and time consuming when faced with large class sizes, high student-faculty ratios, and communications-intensive courses. Furthermore,…

As a man of mystery, little is known about Titus Lucretius except that he was a 1st-century B.C.E. philosopher-poet who wrote an epic poem called "Of the Nature of Things" to explain the universe and people's place within it in strictly material terms. In the poem, Lucretius intertwines myths with scientific hypotheses to propose an Epicurean view…

From Dewey (1933) to present, reflectivity is an important component of teacher education. Little information exists that specifically addresses when changes in reflectivity might occur. Therefore, the purpose of this study was: (a) to apply Van Manen's model to outcomes to examine levels of, and changes in, reflectivity and (b) to verify the…

Application Quests are case-based learning activities that emphasize issues in professional practice and are given as part of the classroom learning process. This qualitative investigation examined students' views regarding the perceived impacts that Application Quests had on their learning. A phenomenological analysis of written assignments from…

This qualitative study explores the uses of reading and note-taking in two pre-service teacher training Social Sciences courses. Data analysis of in-depth interviews with professors and students, class observations and course materials suggested two polar teaching styles according to how bibliography was included in the course and the presence or…

Montessori educators follow Montessori's lead and use the word "work" to describe the child's concentrated attention with a hands-on material. But this word may lead to communication problems with parents and those in the non-Montessori world: educators, administrators, accreditors, and so on. These communication problems are…

An analysis of interviews, focus-group discussions, assessment instruments, and assignment prompts revealed that within general education, faculty assessed critical thinking as faceted using methods and criteria that varied epistemically across disciplines. Faculty approaches were misaligned with discipline-general institutional approaches.…

In a democracy, agents of political socialization, such as schools and parents, generally emphasize the importance of voting. While college students may be exposed briefly to voter registration as a barrier to participation, there is little evidence that the topic is given serious attention in the classroom. This research addresses how classroom…

The aim of this article is to present a methodological model to analyze students' group interaction to improve their essays in online learning environments, based on asynchronous and written communication. In these environments teacher and student scaffolds for discussion are essential to promote interaction. One of these scaffolds can be the…

We propose "instructional chaining" as an analytic method for capturing and describing key instructional episodes enacted by expert writing teachers to foster the recontextualization over time of the social practices of argumentative writing through process-oriented instructional approaches. The article locates instructional chaining…

This article aims to explore the relevance and importance of school subjects in teachers' grading practices, as teachers themselves see it. The study is based on material from 41 semi-structured interviews, with teachers of five subjects, at four lower and two upper secondary schools in Norway. The findings suggest that the school subject does…

Social studies has often had a reputation amongst students for being uninteresting due to the teaching strategies and content that educators have utilized. However, in a field as diverse and relevant as social studies, there are opportunities to garner the attention of students and empower them with information to improve and enhance our democracy…