Sourcing involves interrogating historical documents, asking questions about their attributes to determine their relation to the historical event or time period under study. In this article, a university researcher and a sixth-grade teacher describe a set of heuristics that the teacher developed for supporting her students' sourcing of historical…

Multiplicative thinking is accepted as a "big idea" of mathematics that underpins important mathematical concepts such as fraction understanding, proportional reasoning, and algebraic thinking. It is characterised by understandings such as the multiplicative relationship between places in the number system, basic and extended number…

The author discusses the Learning Futures programme, a partnership set up between the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Innovation Unit. The two organisations had previously worked together on the Musical Futures project that had involved radical new approaches to teaching and learning in secondary school music. (Contains 1 figure and 1 note.)

Meat thermometers can be awkward to use in terms of placement and avoidance of bones. Because of these problems, each year 30 million Thanksgiving turkeys have a built-in thermometer that pops up when the turkey is properly cooked. Turkey timers are an example of how engineering solved a common, everyday problem. The following 5E learning cycle…

This comprehensive book offers a practical pathway for developing twenty-first-century skills while simultaneously strengthening content-area learning. "Digital Learning" contains a wealth of research-based practices to integrate the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) National Education Technology Standards (NETS) for both…

This document offers a planning tool for grades 3-7 that can be used by regional comprehensive centers, other technical assistance centers, and state departments of education to plan professional development for teachers. It is based on the "National Mathematics Advisory Panel Report" which was published in 2008. The panel synthesized its final…

This book describes and illustrates learning paths for the mathematical concepts and skills of each grade 8 Focal Point as presented in Curriculum Focal Points for Prekindergarten through Grade 8 Mathematics. It includes representational supports for teaching and learning that can facilitate understanding, stimulate productive discussions about…

The Progress in Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) was developed to help improve the teaching of reading and the acquisition of reading skills around the world, and was approved by the IEA (International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement) General Assembly as an essential component of the IEA's regular cycle of core studies,…

In sixth grade, students understand that Earth gets visible light from the Sun, but students may also believe the Earth gets heat from the Sun. This last part is incorrect because the Sun is too far from the Earth to heat it directly. So, how does the Sun heat the Earth? When light strikes an object, it can be reflected or absorbed. Absorbed light…

What causes students to leave school? According to Azzam (2007), over 47% of students in the United States who drop out of school reported they did so because school was boring and irrelevant to their life situation. What can schools and teachers do to encourage students to stay in school? One possible solution may be to look at experiential…

In this article, we will describe the results of a study of 6th grade students learning about the mathematics of change. The students in this study worked with software environments for the computer and the graphing calculator that included a simulation of a moving elevator, linked to a graph of its velocity vs. time. We will describe how the…

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of the possible influence of the use in class of Internet resources which offer mathematical exercises for the students' activity and learning processes. I present an exploratory study grounded on a teaching design set up in two French grade six classes about proportional reasoning…

In this essay, the author describes her experience with an experiential model of learning through teaching that gives college students the opportunity to use what they learn in the college classroom to develop curricula and then teach those curricula in an elementary school. Her specific experience was with a science course for non-science majors,…

As a university instructor and a language arts middle school teacher, the authors have been working collaboratively for the last three years. This article describes their collaborative efforts, including what they have learned about their students and about the process of learning through the work they have done together. To introduce their…