Responsive teaching occurs when teachers take up and "respond" to their students' ideas during instruction (J. L. Pierson, 2008). Although responsive teaching is gaining recognition as an effective strategy for encouraging student learning, few methods of analysis are capable of characterizing the different ways in which teachers take up…

Across the nation, states and districts are in the process of building better teacher evaluation systems that not only identify highly effective teachers but also systematically provide data and feedback that can be used to improve teacher practice. "A Practical Guide to Designing Comprehensive Teacher Evaluation Systems" is a tool…

Education leaders and much literature exhort teachers and school leaders to use data more often and more effectively to guide planning and decision making--called, "data driven decision making." This term is ubiquitous in literature and reform discourse, but "on the ground," so to speak, practitioners face significant challenges in analyzing,…

Undergraduate theses and other capstone research projects are standard features of many science curricula, but participation has typically been limited to only the most advanced and highly motivated students. With the recent push to engage more undergraduates in research, some faculty are finding that their typical approach to working with thesis…

This paper discusses an instructional approach designed to help preservice teachers understand how assessments can be influenced by personal biases. In order to achieve this objective, we developed an analogy-based activity called "The Dog Show Analogy." After participating in the activity, we have observed that the participating preservice…

For the past 3 yr, faculty at the University of New Mexico, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology have been using interactive online Problem-Based Learning (PBL) case discussions in our large-enrollment classes. We have developed an illustrative tracking method to monitor student use of problem-solving strategies to provide targeted…