The new Minnesota Standard Adult High School Diploma program has evolved into a viable secondary credential option within the Minnesota Department of Corrections (DOC). This competency-based credential broadened the scope of instruction to include digital literacy and work readiness, providing hope and opportunity for individuals struggling to…

Concept mapping has been widely used in various fields to facilitate students' organization of knowledge. Previous studies have, however, pointed out that it is difficult for students to construct concept maps from the abundant searched data without appropriate scaffolding. Thus, researchers have suggested that students could produce high quality…

Since the summer of 2006, the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA), in the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex, has invited secondary students to participate in their summer SEED program on campus. The program was developed by the Dean of the School of Architecture and the Chair of the Art + Art History Department. SEED (Strategies, Events, Episodes +…

In today's digital age, Web 2.0 tools such as VoiceThread allow users to integrate images, voices, and responses within one digital platform, providing students with the opportunity to add another layer of meaning to their texts. We conducted this research to expand our understanding of the processes necessary for integrating digital tools into…

This article examines how the use of multimedia sources can deepen student engagement, comprehension, and questioning of a variety of texts. Through an American literature project, "The Art of War", high school juniors work in collaboration to read, analyze, and create original digital texts using Animoto.com. As a result, educators are able to…

Classroom teachers routinely make judgments on the quality of their students' work based on their recognition of how effectively the student has assembled key features of the genre or the medium. Yet how readily can teachers talk about the features of student-created multimodal texts in ways that can improve learning and performance? This article…

In this article we report assessment results from two studies in an ongoing design experiment intended to provide a single school system with a sequence of secondary school level (ages 14-18) computer technology courses. In our first study, we share data on students' learning as a function of the required introductory course and their pre-course…