This study was designed to demonstrate the effect of implementing multi-component vocabulary strategy instruction in fourth grade social studies. Curriculum was designed for a six-week period and was intended to actively engage students and reinforce retention of word meanings in isolation and in context. Teachers were randomly chosen for…

"Learning progressions" are one of the most important assessment design ideas to be introduced in the past decade. In the United States, several committees of the National Research Council (NRC) have argued for the use of learning progressions as a means to foster both deeper mastery of subject-matter content and higher level reasoning…

Previous research suggests that elementary teachers vary in their enactment of science curriculum materials and may not always engage students in substantive sense making. This mixed-methods study investigates elementary teachers' use of science curriculum materials to engage students in the scientific practice of comparing and evaluating…

In recent years, as schools have shifted more attention to English language arts and mathematics, several groups have made a plea for renewed attention to civic education for all students. One such group is the Spencer Foundation, which promotes research to improve students' civics knowledge and skills and their dispositions for responsible…

This research illustrates how varying enactments of an engineering-design-based science curriculum shaped the development of students' domain-specific scientific ideas and practices. In this comparative case study rooted in the analytical perspectives of activity theory and learning environments, student and teacher participants in three…

Reviews of research on rural education suggest that identifying ways to help rural schools improve teachers' pedagogical skills should be a high priority. This article addresses this issue by examining changes in reading skills through the primary grades of students in three rural, Midwestern districts that occurred after the implementation of a…

Schools have become more diverse; the number of English Language Learners has increased from two million in 1993-94 to over four million in 2006 (Echevarria, Vogt, and Short, 2001). Most English Language Learners in U.S. schools are of Latino descent. Recent national tests of reading and writing (i.e., the National Assessment of Educational…

In this research study, the type and nature of reading instruction provided for talented readers was investigated through use of in-depth qualitative comparative case studies. A team of researchers conducted multiple observations in 12 different third and seventh grade reading classrooms in both urban and suburban school districts over a 9-month…