Online and blended learning (OBL) brings unique advantages to K-12 teachers and students. Thus, it is essential to prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) for designing effective K-12 OBL lessons in educator preparation programs (EPPs) so they can utilize OBL's distinctive characteristics to benefit their students immediately when they have their own…

Background: China has great student participation in STEM education. Chinese society has a progressive and positive attitude towards STEM as it is considered to provide more opportunities in life. Teachers play a vital role in the success of any STEM program in K-12 schools. However, teachers are facing instructional challenges because of the…

Initial plans for this project arose from a need to address issues of professional development of science and technology teachers that went beyond the norm available within school board settings. Two teams of 4 teachers responded to an invitation to participate in a collaborative action research project. Collaborative action research was chosen in…

Traditionally, models of instructional leadership espouse data-informed decision making in response to student assessment outcomes as one of the core school leader behaviors. In recent years, rising expectations from accountability policies and related assessment practices have myriad implications for school districts, specifically in the areas of…

Dyslexia is a specific learning disability, which affects reading in as many as one in five people. Many children go without proper interventions because of ineffective teaching strategies, and common myths associated with this disability. The purpose of this study was to test how deeply ingrained some myths might be, and decipher where educators…

As the final stage of West Virginia's rollout of the Next Generation Content Standards and Objectives (NxGen CSOs), the regional education service agencies (RESAs) conducted six train-the-trainer events in the spring of 2013 to prepare educators--mostly teachers--to provide professional development back in their home schools and districts. These…

Describes a range of critical incidents that was used with experienced and trainee teachers in order to promote discussion and reflection on the nature of science. Discusses teachers' views on critical evaluation of practical work, reliability and replicability of experiments, accepted scientific explanations, scientific evidence, religious…

This paper reviews the research on mathematics teacher education and mathematics education reform to provide a possible foundation for educating mathematics teachers in rural Appalachia. The paper takes the position that teacher change has certain characteristics and impediments that are not limited to any particular circumstance. Research on…

This document contains the spring and fall 2001 newsletters of the National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented (NRC/GT). The spring 2001 issue contains the following featured articles: (1) "Using Gifted Education Strategies with All Students" (E. Jean Gubbins and NRC/GT Research Team); (2) "New Center for the Pyschology of…

Echoing the current emphasis on examining changes in teacher beliefs, combined with the central role of inquiry in reform, this article argues that science "education" research experiences should hold promise in shaping preservice teachers' beliefs about the role of inquiry in understanding classroom science teaching. The aim of this…

Chapters in this book, based on the efforts of the Urban Education National Network Task Force, define the nature of obstacles to the academic performance of urban students and identify, validate, and disseminate a knowledge base of theory and practice to inform decision making about urban schools. The chapters are: (1) "The Nature of the…

This paper discusses underlying beliefs about teaching that are related to the assessment of prospective teachers and elucidates some basic beliefs that are guiding the development of new types of assessments for new teachers. These new assessments are called "The Praxis Series: Professional Assessments for Beginning Teachers(TM)."…

This paper looks at issues subsumed by the phrase "learning to teach" that have implications for the design and conduct of teacher education. The first section lays out a temporal perspective by examining the times and places of learning to teach. The second section brings together disparate strands of research on the learners of…

This study examined the use of mini-lessons in a less common language as a pedagogical tool to demonstrate different language learning theories, concepts, and methods, thus increasing students' knowledge base and changing their beliefs about language learning. The study involved students from a Master's Degree TESOL program enrolled in a course on…

This PME-NA proceedings volume contains the full text of 41 research papers. In addition, brief usually one-page reports, are provided for 11 oral presentations and 13 poster sessions. The full research reports are as follows: "Cognitive Analysis of Chinese Students' Mathematical Problem Solving" (J. Cai and E. A. Silver); (2)…