Theories of learning developed in education and psychology for the past 100 years are woefully inadequate to support the design of schools and classrooms that foster deep learning and equity. Needed is learning theory that can guide us in creating schools and classrooms where deep learning occurs, where learners' full selves are engaged, and that…

University class size is a frequently debated topic among stakeholders given its relation to student achievement, teaching and learning, program evaluation, and education economics. However, the extant literature in both K-12 and higher education contexts regarding class size is equivocal, with some citing evidence of an adverse effect on student…

Cognitive neuroscience research is typically conducted in controlled laboratory environments and therefore its contribution to our understanding of learning in real-world environments is limited. In recent years, however, portable and wearable brain devices have become more readily available for classroom-based research. Complementing existing…

Education researchers have extensively studied classroom discourse as a way to understand classroom structures and learning. This article proposes the use of social network analysis (SNA) as a method for discourse studies in education. SNA enables us to learn about the connections between persons and the patterns of relations within groups. This…

Current discourses of equity in teaching and learning are framed around calls for inclusion, grounded in the extension of a set of static rights for high-quality learning opportunities for all students. This essay presents a rightful presence framework to guide the study of teaching and learning in justice-oriented ways. This framework highlights…

Over the past 20 years, claims about how and why student writing can serve learning have changed markedly. This has been partly due to new technologies displacing writing as a predominant resource for learning, prompting new sense-making practices and shifts in how these changes are theorized. Learners now routinely collaborate to generate,…

Collaborative intellectual engagement is held in high regard in contemporary educational thought as a pedagogical practice of broad value to K-12 students. To what extent is this enthusiasm warranted? Is the practice uniformly productive, or does variability exist in the contexts in which collaboration is effective, the mechanisms involved, and…

This essay addresses the value of leveraging the unique learning, thinking, and knowledge students develop in home-community spaces for school curriculum. The author explores "everyday resistance" to highlight a particular set of enacted political actions and practices in which students, families, and communities participate to negotiate the…

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in exploring how choices of methods and timing of instruction affect the rate and persistence of learning. The authors review three lines of experimentation--all conducted using educationally relevant materials and time intervals--that call into question important aspects of common instructional…

This article describes elements of an approach to research and development called "design-based implementation research." The approach represents an expansion of design research, which typically focuses on classrooms, to include development and testing of innovations that foster alignment and coordination of supports for improving…

In the past decade, significant shifts have occurred in the nature of the Internet and the conceptualization of classrooms. Such shifts have affected constructs of learning and instruction and paths for future research. In this article, the authors build on three ideas set forth in comments on their article "Web 2.0 and Classroom Research: What…

Curriculum theorists have provided a knowledge base concerning aesthetics, agency, creativity, lived experience, transcendence, learning through the body, and the power of the arts to engender visions of alternative possibilities in culture, politics, and the environment. However, these theoretical threads do not reveal the potential of K-12 dance…

This article was presented as the 2008 Wallace Foundation Distinguished Lecture at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City. It argues that, to generate robust and generative theories of human learning and development, researchers must address the range of diversity within human cultural communities. The…

Although intellectual conflict may be an important instructional tool (because of its potential constructive outcomes), conflict is rarely structured in instructional situations (because of its potential destructive outcomes). Many educators may be apprehensive about instigating intellectual conflict among students because of the lack of…

The goal of this article is to advance an ecological theory of knowing, one that prioritizes engaged participation over knowledge acquisition. To this end, the authors begin by describing the environment in terms of "affordance networks": functionally bound potentials extended in time that can be acted upon to realize particular goals. Although…