Though not empirically established as an efficacious pedagogy for promoting higher order thinking skills, technological/engineering design-based learning in K-12 STEM education is increasingly embraced as a core instructional method for integrative STEM learning that promotes the development of student critical thinking skills (Honey, Pearson,…

Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBDs) often lack appropriate social skills. Participation in direct and explicit instruction related to social skills is common in their educational programming. For these interventions to be effective, it is important that students have the opportunity to apply them in the natural environment.…

Academic achievement for African American and Latino students is lower than for White and Asian students. To help overcome the achievement gap, policymakers and social scientists have focused on the relationships between student outcomes and family, community, and schools. Family, church, and community have always played significant roles in…

School librarian guidelines encourage active leadership in schools. Two ways school librarian educators can encourage school librarians to be leaders are to embed the standards into the certification curriculum and to assess the leadership potential of pre-service school librarians in order to adapt the curriculum to their needs. This mixed-method…

Projects highlighting Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education in high schools have promoted student interest in engineering-related fields and enhanced student understanding of mathematics and science concepts. The Science and Technology Enhancement Program (Project STEP), funded by a NSF GK-12 grant at the University of…

The purpose of this exploratory study was to measure music educators' ("N" = 9) self-perceptions of their use of interpersonal skills. Participants rated themselves on 32 statements included on the "My Use of Interpersonal Skills Inventory" in pre- and posttest formats. Participants participated in a 4-week period of weekly…

Students with mild and moderate disabilities need to be skillful at problem solving. This article provides an overview of a problem-solving intervention designed to teach students with mild and moderate disabilities the skills of problem solving. An explanation of the assessments, materials, instructional outline, and methods is presented.…

Training and technical assistance programs for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have emerged in many states as educators, administrators, and institutions of higher education attempt to address the increasing needs for enhancing the knowledge and skills of educators and disseminating the ever-growing knowledge of educational practices. This report…

This paper reports findings from a survey of Korean special and general education teachers (n = 328) regarding the extent to which they value and deliver instruction to promote the self-determination of students with disabilities in their classrooms. The findings include (a) descriptive statistics summarizing the outcomes of questionnaire items,…

Purpose: Natural reading experiences provide an opportunity for the development of orthographic word knowledge as well as other forms of partial word knowledge. The purpose of this study was to compare the orthographic word knowledge growth of school-age children with relatively low language skills (LL group) to that of age- and gender-matched…

Individuals with disabilities require direct instruction in social skills. The primary purpose of this study was to provide social skills instruction to students with disabilities at the kindergarten through eighth grade level. I worked collaboratively with four other Child Study Team colleagues to develop recruitment, assessment, planning, and…

This study introduces the educational assistant robots that we developed for foreign language learning and explores the effectiveness of robot-assisted language learning (RALL) which is in its early stages. To achieve this purpose, a course was designed in which students have meaningful interactions with intelligent robots in an immersive…

In this article, the authors detail a study of a three-year professional development project designed to increase in-service teachers' classroom technology integration. Participants engaged in learning activities that modeled technology integration from a contextually based perspective that included technology, and pedagogical and content…

This study investigates the effectiveness of computer-delivered hints in relation to problem-solving abilities in two alternative indirect instruction schemes. In one instruction scheme, hints are available to students immediately after they are given a new problem to solve as well as after they have completed the problem. In the other scheme,…

This study reports on a district-wide research-based professional development (PD) that included 207 teachers and administrators. Data were collected from pre/post surveys, content analysis of the participants' wiki pages, and a follow-up questionnaire. Findings indicate that participants significantly improved their foundational and technical…