Though scholarship has long championed the positive impacts of classroom considerations of controversial or difficult issues, teachers have often hesitated to broach divisive topics for numerous reasons, including legislation purporting to limit controversy in classrooms and, often, that they had limited or no preparation to teach controversies,…

This paper explores how PurpleState, a political simulation designed to foster skills and knowledge for informed civic participation, develops students' abilities to counter or resist the effects of political polarization and partisanship. Throughout the simulation, which has been implemented in Virginia and Wisconsin, students are asked to…

The public schoolhouse is one of the few remaining public spaces in which citizens may routinely gather to discuss controversial issues. Furthermore, it is social studies classrooms and teachers, in particular, that bear the moral imperative to ensure such civic discourse takes place. Nevertheless, many social studies teachers refrain from…

Student interest in plants is lacking. Therefore, we investigated potential drivers of situational interest in cultivated plants and interactions between different dimensions of interest, i.e. topic, context and learning activity. A total of 462 high school students (14-17 years of age) rated two sets of questionnaire items combining eight plants…

Recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of increasing the intellectual viability of lower-level foreign language (FL) study while facilitating connections between academic practice, learners' lives, and global communities. This article reports on a content-based role-immersion simulation (RIS) designed to incite a critical orientation…

Augmented reality (AR) technologies are identified as one of key emerging technologies for education in the next 5 years. AR takes advantage of virtual objects or information overlaying physical objects or environments, resulting in a mixed reality in which virtual objects and real environments coexist in a meaningful way to augment learning…