Exploring explored principals' and teachers' perceptions concerning the role of play in early childhood programs was this quantitative inquiry. All early childhood participants identified play as a learning tool but noted it was being eliminated from the curriculum due to high stake accountability. There was a significant difference between…

Large scale educational assessments conducted in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) show a substantial gap between the performance of different types of schools. This study used the 2015 Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) to investigate how student- and school-related variables accounted for the variation among schools. The results…

This paper focuses on the issue of mentor-mentee match for mentoring beginning teachers in elementary schools. While grade-level match is often an explicit goal of mentor assignment in many existing teacher mentoring programs, empirical evidence is limited regarding its effects on teachers' instructional practices. Data come from a large-scale…

Political resistance to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) has grown in recent years, yet little empirical research has examined this subject. Drawing on Fukuyama's theory of political order and decay, we provide a case study of the politics surrounding the CCSS in Oklahoma, one of three states to have fully repealed the CCSS after initially…

In 2013 the Vermont legislature enacted Act 77 mandating that students in grades 7-12 develop personalized learning plans (PLPs) to guide them toward high school graduation using proficiency based requirements. In a qualitative self-study the authors document the implementation of a personal learning framework integrating PLPs into a humanities…

This paper is based on a study of 20 elementary teachers, especially in their tenth year of teaching (2013-2014). At this time, the teachers were working under heavy pressure from their government and school districts to implement "inquiry learning." While broadly accepting this pedagogy, however, the teachers varied substantially in…

This presentation promotes cross-cultural conversation regarding the theorization of non-violence in education. Through the use of duoethnography, two researchers exchange ideas related to diversifying the notion of non-violence. Author 1, informed by Korean Taoism, Neo-Confucianism, and Donghak (Eastern Learning), argues for non-violence not as…

We present main effects of treatment and moderating effects of student background on science and engineering outcomes for grades 3-5 children participating in an engineering intervention. Data is from a large-scale randomized-controlled trial of two matched pairs (intervention and comparison) of engineering units. The intervention curriculum…

Framed in theories of multimodality and picture books, this interpretivist research examined teachers' use of visual literacy elements during one school year as they taught language arts and social studies in their upper elementary grade classrooms. The data, which included field notes, interviews, observations, classroom artifacts, and…

In this paper, we report on teachers' use of curricula and other instructional resources to address Common Core State Standards (CCSS), as well as how use of instructional materials is related to instructional practice. We draw on data from the American Teacher Panel, a nationally representative sample of teachers who periodically provide…

The qualitative study reported in this paper focuses on the ethical dimensions of curriculum and its interpretation and implementation by secondary school teachers. It explores what teachers do to respond to a curriculum that increasingly adopts a values-laden perspective (e.g., social justice education, critical literacy) that establishes…

The MSU-Wipro UrbanSTEM & Leadership fellowship program was formed to enhance teaching and leadership capacities of teachers in a large urban school district. The program is built on Technical and Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) and its instructional approach uses the power of experience (Dewey,…

This study examines teachers' initial conceptions of an integrated STEM-PBL approach and their perceptions of what facilitates or hinders implementation in their schools. This study took place within the first year of a three-year STEM Professional Development (PD) program for middle school math, science and English language arts teachers. The two…