Over the last decade, museums have reevaluated the ways in which they serve the public, particularly K-12 audiences. As funding concerns, travel distance, and school requirements prevent many students from visiting museums in person, America's 8.9 million rural students are disproportionately impacted, and educators are left to fill the gap with…

Virtual reality is an emerging technology that has resulted in rapid expansion in the development of virtual immersive environments for use as educational simulations in schools, colleges and universities. This article presents an overview of virtual reality, describes a number of applications currently being used by special educators for…

This article reports a subset of findings from a larger study centered on designing a series of six digital learning objects to help Grade 5 (age 10-12) students begin to consider the nature of models (understood as the physical or mental representation of objects, phenomena, or processes), the particle nature of matter, and the behavior of…

The National frameworks for science emphasize inquiry skills (NRC, 1996), however, in typical classroom practice, science learning often focuses on rote learning in part because science process skills are difficult to assess (Fadel, Honey, & Pasnick, 2007) and rote knowledge is prioritized on high-stakes tests. Short answer assessments of…