Jennifer Miller is a special education preschool teacher at Grant Elementary School in Muscatine, Iowa. In this article, she describes how she created and implemented a learning center with three-to-five-year-old students in an integrated morning class (nine students; four on IEPs) and an integrated afternoon class (10 students; four on IEPs) to…

Proving a child has been adequately educated is manifest through assessments evaluating the recall of facts or the deciphering of codes. How this information is taught and learned is the issue. Webb's depth of knowledge (DOK) and Bloom's taxonomy are cognitive models that drive instruction in today's classrooms. According to these models,…

Traditional assignments that aim to develop and evaluate creative problem solving skills are frequently foregone in large marketing classes due to the daunting grading prospect they present. Here, a new assessment method is introduced: the "snapsignment." Through photography, individual projects can be assigned that promote higher order…

Most educators who teach the advertising campaigns course require students to work as groups. A review of cooperative learning and group dynamics literature, however, suggests that unless students are systematically prepared for group work instructional goals will be difficult to achieve. This article describes how pre-training activities in group…

Learning curves have proven to be a useful tool for understanding how a student learns a given skill as they progress through a curriculum. A learning curve for a given Knowledge Component (KC) is a plot of some measure of competence as a function of the number of opportunities the student has had to apply that KC. Consider the case where each…

Instruction can be made relevant to students when it draws upon and utilizes their interests, experiences, and "funds of knowledge" in productive ways to support classroom learning. This approach has been referred to as "context personalization." In this paper, we discuss the cognitive basis of personalization interventions,…

The educational landscape around standards, assessment, professional development, and funding is changing at a rapid pace. This article asks how can education institutions--and educators--respond with a balance of urgency and coherence? How can education institutions temper the need for risk-taking and innovation with the responsibility to deliver…

This article describes how a teacher in Mexico City worked with two researchers on an instructional design project to help kindergartners become proficient in participating in whole-class mathematical conversations.

As a group of middle school mathematics teachers and teacher educators, the authors have focused their attention on using innovative practices coupled with high cognitive demand tasks to engage students, pique their interest in mathematics, and promote conceptual understanding. This article explores their three-act task design. In act 1, students…

Recently, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has called for proposals on the "greening" of the Spanish curriculum for their 2020 convention. University students are and will be faced with complex twenty-first-century economic problems, such as food deserts, costs of industrial agriculture, organic regulations and market demand,…

Service-learning can provide a range of literacy learning experiences for children as they work to solve real world problems and engage in inquiry, collaboration and reflection. Rather than being an extracurricular activity, service-learning projects are designed to meet standards and align with existing curriculum. This article explores how…

If a person has "a problem" to solve and knows the solution and just has to apply it (retrieve it from memory and re-act), it is not a problem--it is a task; if a person does not know the solution and has to create it--this is a problem. Using this language, there are only two situations: (a) one has to perform a task; or (b) one has to…

In the "Australian Curriculum," the concept of mathematical induction is first met in the senior secondary subject Specialist Mathematics. This article details an example, the Tower of Hanoi problem, which provides an enactive introduction to the inductive process before moving to more abstract and cognitively demanding representations.…

In this article the authors describe an instructional unit designed and taught in two classes of kindergarten children. The goals of the unit were to present a "driving question" to motivate the process of statistical investigation, to genuinely engage children in the stages of statistical investigation, and to facilitate them in…

Paper folding, or origami in Japanese, is a traditional craft that has been enjoyed by both children and adults for hundreds of years. Mathematicians have long studied the mathematics of paper folding. They use square papers to construct mathematical shapes (for example, folding an equilateral triangle from a square paper or trisecting an angle),…