Between the Fall of 2016 through February of 2022 (the start of the pandemic) the author drove as an independent contractor for both Uber and Lyft--the ridesharing companies. During this time, he provided 4,590 rides (with a 4.97- star rating) in Boston, MA and the neighboring communities. When he decided to drive for these rideshare platforms, he…

Making inferences is essential to comprehending text. Teachers can ask inferential questions, model their thinking, and teach specific strategies to support upper elementary students in making inferences while reading.

This article discusses the place of thematic coherence in various approaches to educational dialogue and proposes a unifying approach to the analysis of thematic coherence of classroom conversations based on research in educational dialogue, philosophy of language and recent advances in linguistic research on discourse structure. Addressing the…

Classroom interactions emerging from socioscientific argumentation may be incompatible with the traditional definitions of learning, thus creating tension and potentially undermining its implementation. Leveraging existing literature, we identify argumentative talk that shifts away from scientific content and toward subjective claims, as well as…

Teachers play a key role in communicating with parents to support student learning. One of the more challenging aspects of this role for teachers is having a difficult conversation with a parent about their child. Difficult conversations, when needed, are best accomplished face-to-face incorporating effective communication skills to promote a…

Biomedical engineering (BME) spans a wide range of research fields and professional activities. Most BME departments use a seminar series to introduce graduate students to exciting research conducted outside their own university, learn about professional opportunities, and enhance their understanding of related topics (e.g., ethics in BME,…

Automatic question generation and the assessment of procedural knowledge is still a challenging research topic. This article focuses on the case of it, the techniques of parsing grammars for compiler construction. There are two well-known techniques for parsing: top-down parsing with LL(1) and bottom-up with LR(1). Learning these techniques and…

How can educators engage students in learning, thinking, and inquiring? One consideration is teaching with a set of two contradictory texts--texts that have some contradiction between them. The authors find that when students read these books in tandem, they show an innate response of actively wanting to learn, think, and inquire in powerful ways.…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics's "Principles to Actions" (NCTM, 2014) cites posing purposeful questions and eliciting and using evidence of student thinking as effective mathematics teaching practices. Interviewing students creates opportunities for teachers to develop these practices. Through interviewing, they can try…

Learning theories provide philosophically informed, basic principles for understanding the mechanisms through which people learn based on a combination of field or laboratory studies. Unfortunately, however, there are several clear conflicts between theoretical approaches and common methods in teaching. Consequently, key challenges among teachers…

Parents play a vital role in shaping the ways young children understand the world around them. This paper reports on how the Community Mathematics Project (CMP)--a mathematics tutoring program for parents of diverse young children--affected the ways parents engaged in mathematical sensemaking while using virtual manipulatives and questioning to…

Deliberation and inquiry can go hand-in-hand. Inquiry-based learning calls on teachers to facilitate student-led discovery, something that can only happen when students ask questions and weigh possible answers before settling on a plausible and evidentiary answer. Teaching through inquiry is about setting students up to wrestle with the issue at…

American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses "wh"-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien,…

This article uses the Stephen Crane story "The Open Boat" (freely available on the American English website) as an anchor text to demonstrate how teachers can apply Raphael's Question-Answer Relationship (QAR) technique to a text that students might be assigned to read. The article includes numerous examples and tips that teachers can…

Research confirms that critical thinking plays a fundamental role in decision making and problem solving, skills that are essential to function as successful adults in a complex world. Consequently, it has been a focus of educational research for decades. Faculty meetings and teacher training sessions repeatedly run sessions on ways that teachers…