During the fall of 2019, the chaotic American political landscape was charged with scandal, debate, and accusations. As a result, students would often bring local and national politics into the authors' high school English language arts (ELA) classes. Instead of ignoring the students' heated debates in the classroom, the authors decided to embrace…

This study examined the effects of school climate (open classroom and positive student relationships) and personality dispositions (shyness and need for cognition) on adolescents' political self-efficacy. Data were collected in 2014 from 1,954 Czech ninth- and tenth-graders (mean age = 15.60). A multilevel analysis showed that school-level…

The cognitive-motivational process model of learning describes how personality traits in a specific situation influence current learner motivation and through certain mediators, the learning outcome. This study investigates the influence of personality traits and current motivation on these mediators. For 86 high school students playing a…

While academic, cultural, and racial identities have been important concepts in sociocultural theories of learning and development, less attention has been given to political identity. Research on political identities in education tends to be limited to critical pedagogy or civic education contexts, leaving unexamined the role of political…

Over the past decade, abroad range of policymakers, corporations, educators, and scholars in the United States have catapulted computer science (CS) education from the sidelines to the center of K-12 public education discourse. While calls for CS education are often framed in terms of national and economic competitiveness, there is a growing…

The present study focuses on political efficacy in terms of students' competence self-perceptions related to the domain of politics. The investigation addresses the mean level development and longitudinal relations to outcome variables including gender differences. Drawing on a sample of N = 2,504 German students, political efficacy, along with…

Research investigating the practice of citizenship education in multicultural schools is scarce. Drawing on classroom observations and teacher and student interviews in four multicultural Grade 10 Civics classrooms in Ottawa, Canada, this case study discusses one teacher's unique citizenship education pedagogy, an approach that embraces democratic…

In this article, I document a series of pedagogical responses in my high school instrumental music classroom following the events of Eric Garner's murder in New York City. Foregrounding traditions of black radical politics and aesthetics originating with the Black Power Movement in the 1960s, I explore their implications for classroom practice in…

This paper describes the development of different lesson plans dealing with authentic and controversial socio-scientific issues in the framework of climate change. These lesson plans orient themselves along the socio-critical, problem-oriented approach to science teaching. They deal with the use of bioethanol as an alternative fuel and with the…

Contexts are currently enjoying much prominence in school mathematics. Generally, the contextual issues and situations learners are exposed to and deal with in Mathematical Literacy are, with good reason, determined by curriculum, learning resource and test designers. This article reports on a study that investigated contexts that learners would…

If history teachers' aim is to teach students how to think, why not ask: What forms of thought do historians use, and what specific techniques will inculcate these forms? In this article, the author proposes a fundamental shift, from courses with a focus on the mastery of data to courses with a priority on learning the historian's craft. The…