Play is an essential component of childhood, but parents and educators sometimes view it as an optional add-on, which gets in the way of learning. This view persists in spite of evidence that play is helpful and sometimes critical to learning in multiple domains, perhaps because precise mechanisms whereby play occasions learning are not well…

A new approach, termed the "scale factor method," is presented for solving a variety of stoichiometry problems. Students taught to solve mass-mass stoichiometry problems using this method found it more intuitive and had a higher rate of success than students using the traditional dimension analysis approach. The scale factor approach…

This article is based on results from research that addressed the ways young Black Metal musicians construct their musical learning and socialization. In this article we will focus on one of the strands in that study; a trace of a classic ideal from "Bildung" theory. Using Bildung theory, we explore similarities between the ideals and…

The rationale behind this special issue is to underscore the importance of studying instructional materials in context--that is, how materials and textbooks are used by teachers and learners. Research on teaching materials needs to reach beyond traditional 'armchair' analyses and evaluations to appreciate the place of instructional materials in…

The author relates their involvement in the process of testing a picture storybook to teach science concepts. The project asked: If children were learning through a story where the science content was explicit, would children be able to explain the science in the context of the story and then in real-world contexts? Would the learning become…

Unlearning is a recurrent theme in Japan. To further understanding of what this entails, we focus on the view of learning laid out by a revered 13th century Zen-inspired playwright. For Zeami, learning involved a movement from the acquisition to unlearning of skills, punctuated by an experience of "mushin," followed by creative…

Learning progressions have become an important construct in educational research, in part because of their ability to inform the design of coherent standards, curricula, assessments, and instruction. In this paper, I discuss how a learning progressions approach has guided our development of an early algebra innovation for the elementary grades and…

Learning progressions (LPs) are descriptions of students' growing sophistication in the understanding of a particular construct through a curricular sequence. They are particularly useful for organizing complex constructs for which students do not necessarily connect concepts as taught in different courses. However, they are challenging to…

Children develop and learn within dynamic contexts, yet the simplifying assumptions of common statistical methods often relegate such complexity to unexplained error. This chapter discusses ideas from the dynamic systems literature, which focuses on the interplay within and between components of complex systems, such as individuals and their…

Baroody, Lai & Mix [2006. The development of young childrens number and operation sense and its implications for early childhood education. In B. Spodek, & O. N. Saracho (Eds.), "Handbook of research on the education of young children" (2nd Ed., pp. 187-221). NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.] differentiate between four different learning…

Using geographic information systems (GIS), spatial data, and web mapping tools to enrich teaching and learning in geography courses is an effective way to integrate critical thinking and spatial analysis into the classroom (or virtual classroom). This lesson describes mapping song lyrics through ArcGIS Online. It explores how students analyze and…

Culture in the teaching and learning of foreign languages tends to be stereotypical and monolithic, marginalizing the diversity of local cultures and practices and resulting in a monocultural and monolingual bias. Expanding on the ACTFL Cultures and Comparisons Standards, the current article presents the MAPS model for Exploring Local Cultures…

It is said that children are amazing at acquiring their first language (L1); by the time they reach school age, they are using complex grammar and demonstrating a wide vocabulary. Even more impressive, these young learners might show up at school with two languages in their toolbox or add a second language (L2) with far less effort than older…

The Whole Class Ensemble Tuition (WCET) is a model of teaching and learning music which takes place in many English primary schools. It is a relative newcomer to music pedagogy in the primary school. In the groundbreaking study reported in this paper, two new models of teaching and learning music are proposed. These are (a) "Music education…

There is a broad consensus that beginning teachers of mathematics need a strong foundation in mathematical knowledge for teaching (MKT), defined as the mathematical knowledge required to recognize, understand, and respond to the mathematical work of teaching one must engage in. One recurrent challenge in teacher education is how to provide support…