The current NCLB/ESSA-generation [No Child Left Behind/Every Student Succeeds Act] of pre-service teachers in the U.S. received their K-12 schooling during the standardized test-focused education accountability era. There is little research exploring how they perceive the disconnect between their K-12 teacher-centered, test-focused school…

School change has been at center of school reform, and many schools have moved to meet the needs of students in various areas. In many instances, there has been only one addition to the school system to serve as the element of school change. Today's school communities need a deeper understanding not only of what research says about school change,…

It has been projected that 33% of all school children will be from immigrant households by the year 2040 (Suarez-Orozco et al., 2010). For school personnel (e.g., administrators, counselors, teachers) working with immigrant youth and adolescents, understanding ethnic identity development is an essential cultural competency. In this essay, the…

As defined in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act, occupational and physical therapists provide services to support students to access, participate, and progress in their educational program within the least restrictive educational environment. Educationally relevant occupational and physical therapy services in school…

Learner-centred education (LCE) has been a recurrent theme in many national education policies in the global South, and has had wide donor support through aid programmes and smaller projects and localised innovations. However, the history of the implementation of LCE in different contexts is riddled with stories of failures grand and small. In…

This question came from Eula Donaldson of Guilford Child Development in Greensboro, North Carolina. Eula is a lead teacher in a Head Start classroom which also receives More at Four funding. More at Four is a state funded program that helps support teacher salaries and makes it feasible for licensed teachers to work in non-public school settings.…

How schools are organized and interact with the local community can dramatically alter the odds for improving student achievement. There are five essential supports for school improvement: a coherent instructional guidance system, the professional capacity of its faculty, strong parent-community-school ties, a student-centered learning climate,…

Aimed at documenting the problems and constraints confronting learner-centered instruction in Turkey, this article first explains the link between democracy and education and the role of learner-centered instruction in realizing democratic ends. By drawing on John Dewey's ideas and Turkish scholars' perspectives on Turkish education, the article…

The challenge of maximizing student learning has been paramount in many societies. This issue has become especially salient in the context of drastic social and political changes that have taken place in countries such as Kyrgyzstan. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, teachers and students are confronted with new ways of thinking, which are…

This qualitative case study explored the practices, programs, and processes within one urban charter high school. The school has been in existence for ten years and has a history of attracting and retaining students who have been described as "at risk" of academic failure. The study was designed to provide an in-depth, rich understanding of the…

Hong Kong has been actively promoting a student-centered approach to teaching since the 1980s. Despite this effort, students in Hong Kong still tend to be traditional learners who rarely experience and gain from real student-centered learning. While teachers hold a "quantitative" concept of learning and focus on transmitting declarative…

The literature is replete with studies about the importance of context in relation to teaching and learning. Major international studies such as PISA, among others, attempt to develop an understanding of achievement in science learning in a variety of educational contexts. Here we explore the influence of educational context itself on science…

In a technologically advanced, media-saturated culture, children are often confronted with realities that are as disturbing as they are real. Educators search for ways to deal with events that are so compelling that everything else drowns in the tide. They search for ways to bring these events into the learning environment in a manner that is…

This document contains the second volume of the proceedings of the 29th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education. Conference papers are centered around the theme of "Learners and Learning Environments." This volume features 43 research reports by presenters with last names beginning between Adl…

The IADIS CELDA 2012 Conference intention was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There had been advances in both cognitive psychology and computing that have affected the educational arena. The convergence of these two disciplines is increasing at a…