Schools have transitioned from single-component health and wellness programs to comprehensive initiatives aimed at fostering continual and sustained improvement in children's overall health and wellness. These interventions, with a focus on knowledge and behavior change, can effectively promote the adoption of healthy behaviors among children.…

The 2012 report by the US President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) predicts a deficit in the workforce for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in the following decade and emphasizes the importance of addressing this shortfall. According to the report, less than half of the three million students…

This dissertation conducted a science classroom intervention using two instructional approaches, computational modeling and paper-based pictorial modeling, in the context of food webs. A series of research papers were written on the impact of the intervention on students' attitudes and learning, and on teachers via professional development and…

In today`s complex and fast-evolving world, problem solving is an important skill to possess. For young children to be successful at their future careers, they need to have the "skill" and the "will" to solve complex problems that are beyond the well-defined problems that they learn to solve at schools. One promising approach…

Many students experience difficulties learning to program. They find learning to program in the object-oriented paradigm particularly challenging. As a result, computing educators have tried a variety of instructional methods to assist beginning programmers. These include developing approaches geared specifically toward novices and experimenting…

If it is true that bullying begins in elementary school and peaks in middle school, schools are obvious laboratories of research, undeniable arenas of investigation. With a reality of physical, social, and emotional undoing, and a result of serious short and long term repercussions, this phenomenon not only affects the social environments, but the…

The test scores of spatial ability for women lag behind those of men in many spatial tests. On the Mental Rotations Test (MRT), a significant gender gap has existed for over 20 years and continues to exist. High spatial ability has been linked to efficiencies in typical computing tasks including Web and database searching, text editing, and…