In Chile, the influence of the socioeconomic make-up of classrooms on achievement has been extensively studied in mathematics and language, but less in currently important non-traditional subjects such as civic knowledge. This paper analyses the effects of the socioeconomic composition of classrooms on students' civic knowledge achievement in…

Modern biology has become increasingly molecular in nature, requiring students to understand basic chemical concepts. Studies show, however, that many students fail to grasp ideas about atom rearrangement and conservation during chemical reactions or the application of these ideas to biological systems. To help provide students with a better…

Background: Despite numerous educational reform efforts aimed at aggressively addressing achievement disparities, Latinos continue to underperform in school. In sharp contrast to the belief that the inordinate achievement disparities among Latino students stem from deficiencies, some researchers assert that culturally responsive teaching (CRT)…

Some problems exist at the intersection of statistics and probability, creating a dilemma in relation to the best approach to assist student understanding. Such is the case with problems presented in two-way tables representing conditional information. The difficulty can be confounded if the context within which the problem is set is one where…

Students' frequent exposure to inquiry-based science teaching is presumed more effective than their exposure to traditional didactic instruction in helping improve competence in content knowledge and problem solving. Framed through theoretical perspectives of inquiry-based instruction and culturally relevant pedagogy, this study examines this…

A potential method for teaching geospatial thinking and reasoning (GTR) is through geospatially enabled learning technologies. We developed an energy resources geospatial curriculum that included learning activities with geographic information systems and virtual globes. This study investigated how 13 urban middle school teachers implemented and…

Climate change science is a challenging topic for student learning. This quantitative study examined the effectiveness of a geospatial curriculum approach to promote climate change science understandings in an urban school district with eighth-grade students and investigated whether teacher- and student-level factors accounted for students'…