Teacher education programs across the United States must prepare teachers who have the content area knowledge, pedagogical expertise, and cultural competence needed to teach an increasingly diverse student population. One consistent suggestion for programs committed to preparing culturally responsive teachers is to incorporate investigations of…

This article considers how instructors with larger classes can utilize Web 2.0 tools to help students develop as writers. Meeting the needs of readers defines strong writing, yet students need to interact with authentic audiences to learn to do this well. A growing body of educators is exploring how blogging can be used to enhance student…

In this paper, we report on the impact of four activities and two interviews on the organization of an introductory statistics course attended by future mathematics teachers at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The activities were designed to enhance students' learning and collaborative knowledge construction, based on Vygotsky's…

This exploratory case study shares teacher candidates' perspectives and experiences of an Aboriginal infusion at York University's Faculty of Education field site in Barrie, Ontario. For this initiative, Aboriginal content and pedagogies were infused throughout placements and courses of the mainstream teacher education program. Teacher candidates…

Twenty-eight freshmen majoring in biology and/or chemistry in an Arab college in Israel, were given a pre-test and a post-test in which they had to identify the control group and design a controlled experiment. During the course an intervention was used. Science was taught by inquiry while using strategies that promote higher-order thinking skills…

New high-frequency, automated data collection and analysis algorithms could offer new insights into complex learning processes, especially for tasks in which students have opportunities to generate unique open-ended artifacts such as computer programs. These approaches should be particularly useful because the need for scalable project-based and…

Prompted by the need for leaders able to turn around chronically low-performing schools, states, universities, education groups, and school districts in the US have initiated a variety of principal development programs. Some programs focus on enhancing the skills of experienced administrators, while others target talented teachers and even…

The author describes alternatives to traditional ways of conceptualizing the early American literature survey course, focusing on film ("1492" and "Black Robe").

Leaders must become life-long learners if they are to remain effective in an environment that is both global and changing at an exponential pace. As Day (1992) noted, personal growth is essential in the leadership development process. In a personal leadership development course, students are required to complete a personal growth project in order…

Much composition pedagogy begins writing instruction within familiar territory. As a result, composition educators often structure curriculum and courses so that students first write in familiar genres, like personal narratives, and examine and critique their own lives, experiences, and even beliefs through those genres before turning to…

Participation, a commonly graded component of composition classrooms, is rarely the focus of current research studies. While some discussions have addressed grading practices or ways to increase participation, student and instructor voices have yet to be included in studies of classroom participation in composition courses. Yet these voices are…

Developed as a concept in the science of choice, subtle interactions--or "nudges"--can influence people's actions without infringing on their freedom of choice. This article makes the case that not only can the wealth of digital data in higher education nudge students to better achievement and persistence but also that the knowledge embedded in…

In the current object-oriented paradigm, software construction increasingly involves creating and utilizing "software components". These components can serve a variety of functions, from common algorithmic processes to database connectivity to graphical interfaces. The advantage of component architectures is that programmers can use pre-existing…

A growing number of school districts are trying to break up concentrations of poverty on their campuses by taking students' family income into consideration in school assignments. Some of the districts replaced race with socioeconomic status as a determining indicator after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that using race as the primary factor…

Decades of research into which instructional strategies are successful in K-12 history and social studies conclude that having students write is extremely important. Effective writing assignments--whether a 3- to 5-paragraph essay, a longer term-paper-style assignment, or even a fictional short story based on a historical period or event--require…