Engineering offers new educational opportunities for students, yet also poses challenges about how to conceptualize the disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science and engineering practices of the disciplinary fields of engineering. In this paper, we draw from empirical studies of engineering in professional and school settings to…

Ecoliteracy is the pedagogical grouping of environmental science, ecology and sustainability studies. This paper is a policy analysis of how principal training and evaluation standards may support a principal's building-level efforts to establish and sustain an ecoliteracy mission and curriculum in US public K-12 schools. A comparative case study…

Education standards do not flop spectacularly. Their failure gives rise to nothing like the black-and-white films of early aeronautical experiments: no missiles exploding on launch pads or planes tumbling from the sky. But 10 years after 46 of the 50 states adopted the Common Core standards, the lack of evidence that they have improved student…

Written communication and oral communication are inextricably linked as essential life skills and as desirable educational outcomes. However, there is a clear disconnect between what Alabama colleges expect of their graduates and what they are providing them in terms of oral communication education. The steps taken to develop the general studies…

The Common Core State Standards, released in 2010, were rapidly adopted by more than 40 states. Champions maintained that these rigorous standards would transform American education, but the initiative went on to encounter a bumpy path. A decade on, what are we to make of this ambitious effort? What kind of impact, if any, has it had on the…

Teacher professional development (PD) is a complex, ongoing challenge as educational systems attempt to deliver excellent programming in pursuit of increased student achievement (Opfer and Pedder 2011). This article examines Idaho Total Instructional Alignment (TIA), a model for teacher PD that is currently being utilized in secondary schools…

English language learners (ELLs) in K-12 schools continue to increase in number across the country. In California alone, about 1.5 million students are not sufficiently proficient in English to perform optimally in mainstream classrooms. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 emphasizes the need for highly qualified teachers, but just who is…

What is meant by the term "standards"? This article will use the definition of the National Academy of Sciences for their workshop on Assessing the Role of K-12 Academic Standards, "generally used to refer to both content standards, which describe material that students should be expected to learn, and performance standards, which…

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has invested in the development and dissemination of instructional tools to support teachers' incorporation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) into their classroom instruction. Math experts have developed formative assessment lessons (FALs) that teachers can incorporate throughout the year's curriculum.…

Measuring History complements the cases presented in Wise Social Studies Practices (Yeager & Davis, 2005). Yeager and Davis highlight the rich and ambitious teaching that can occur in the broad context of state-level testing. In this book, the chapter authors and I bring the particular state history tests more to the fore and examine how…