Rural schools, especially smaller ones, offer enormous opportunities for teachers to get to know their students and to cultivate their academic talents. However, students with potential in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) face specific obstacles to having their talents fully realized in rural schools. Joni Lakin, Tamra…

Game-based learning has received more focus as a way to engage students and increase interest in mathematics. Game-based learning should be integrated with effective practices for teaching mathematics, though these is a need for further research on effective implementation models. The purpose of this article is to describe two modes of game-based…

Service-learning college courses and service-learning components of traditional courses combine discipline-specific learning objectives with service activities in the community. "Chemistry Discovery" is a one-unit service-learning course focused on chemistry outreach at the University of Arizona. In a collaborative learning environment,…

A unique partnership between public charter schools, a civic chamber orchestra, and university school of music has brought music instruction to middle school students in central Ohio. This collaborative endeavor can serve as a model for charter schools administrators wishing to expand their curricular offerings to include music and other arts…

Higher education institutions are in a great position to create authentic programming to support local underfunded or underperforming public school districts. This article gives an overview of an education outreach collaborative between a 4-year public university, local schools, and a community institution and highlights lessons learned from the…

Education for young adolescents must be challenging, relevant, integrative, and exploratory. Integrative teaching (e.g., interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, etc.) benefits middle-level learners as it potentially increases student engagement, motivation, and achievement. It provides learners with the opportunity to synthesize…

The university aims to form professionals through transmission and dissemination of knowledge, therefore, the Extension, as a tool of the universities, has a major role contributing to improvements in the learning and teaching process. The Extension projects are extremely important for The Federal Technological University of Paraná (UTFPR), since…

Over the last twenty-five years, the Minnesota Historical Society, the University of Minnesota Libraries, and Minitex have developed a partnership centered on creating pathways to higher education by engaging local middle school and high school students in immersive programs at academic libraries. These activities vary in scope and content, but…

Recently, many local normal universities have been carrying out transformation and development project. Leshan Normal University, a local normal university, is prone to change traditional talents cultivation mode. By taking LSNU as an example, this paper attempts to make an exploration on constructing application-oriented talents training system…

This article summarizes the continuous latent trait IRT approach to skills diagnosis as particularized by a representative variety of continuous latent trait models using item response functions (IRFs). First, several basic IRT-based continuous latent trait approaches are presented in some detail. Then a brief summary of estimation, model…

Our article is based on a study of our integration of social foundations coursework with filmmaking and participatory action research, bringing teacher candidates and middle and high school students together. The project was carried out in partnership between an urban university and two nearby public schools within a Midwestern city known for high…