Recognizing that teaching efficacy beliefs influence pedagogical content knowledge, this study assesses the impact of a general methods course on preservice teachers' efficacy beliefs and instructional planning of environmental education content. The course used explicit and visible strategies to support pedagogical and content knowledge…

The recent debates about what constitutes scientific research in Education, on the one hand, and the so-called "paradigm wars" that got played out in the final quarter of the 20th century, on the other, are more similar than different. At the center of both controversies was the relative worth of quantitative and qualitative research…

This study addressed how different instructional strategies affected preservice elementary teachers' levels of math anxiety and their achievement in a math content course while considering descriptions of their experiences in the course in relation to their math anxiety and achievement. The instructional strategies used were traditional teaching…

This research examined the outcome of a year two intervention which aligned two instructional contexts, to impact preservice teachers' Environmental Education (EE) self-efficacy beliefs and their use of inquiry-based instruction. The intervention immersed candidates in inquiry-based pedagogies and EE content across a science content course and a…

Our work investigates students' perception of collaborative expertise and the role of inquiry-based learning in the context of team-based entrepreneurship education. Specifically, we examine students' perception of communication, division of work, shared goals, team conflicts and leadership in their respective teams. In addition, we look at the…

The study explored how to best use scaffolds for supporting students' inquiry practices in computer-supported learning environments. We designed a series of inquiry units assisted with three versions of written inquiry prompts (generic and context-specific); that is, three scaffold-fading conditions: implicit, explicit, and fading. We then…

This inquiry developed during the process of "quantitizing" qualitative data the authors had gathered for a mixed methods curriculum efficacy study. Rather than providing the intended rigor to their data coding process, their use of an intercoder reliability metric prompted their investigation of the multiplicity and messiness that, as they…

This monograph provides an active discourse on the novel field of "Educational Science" and how it conducts in-depth research investigations first presented in an article by the author in the i-managers "Journal of Mathematics." Educational Science uses the innovative Total Transformative Trichotomy-Squared [Tri-Squared] Test…

The purpose of this study was to explore the effectiveness of the creative inquiry-based science teaching on students' creative science thinking and science inquiry performance. A quasi-experimental design consisting one experimental group (N = 20) and one comparison group (N = 24) with pretest and post-test was conducted. The framework of the…

This mixed-methods research study investigated the effects of Appreciative Inquiry on student-course engagement and attendance in core academic classes at a community college in central Mississippi. In an increasingly competitive global economy, most individuals need education or technical skills beyond high school to secure employment offering…

While many studies focus on why teachers leave the classroom, there remains a need to study why teachers persist in teaching. One area to study is the beliefs of teachers, which may impact persistence in the field. This 5-year mixed-methods study explored whether 35 beginning secondary science teachers' beliefs were related to their persistence in…

Calls for better preparation of STEM teachers have been prominent in educational communities and among the public for the past several years (e.g. American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, 2007). Some research suggests one way to improve mathematics instruction is to increase elementary pre-service teachers' "mathematical…

This monograph provides a psychological rational for the novel field of "Educational Science" and how it conducts in-depth research investigations first presented in an article by the author in the i-manager's "Journal on Mathematics" through the trichotomous analysis of the affective domain. Educational Science uses the…

Teachers' use of inquiry has been studied largely without regard for the disciplines in which teachers practice. As a result, there is no theoretical understanding of the possible role of discipline in shaping teachers' conceptions and enactment of inquiry. In this mixed-methods study, conceptions and enactment of inquiry for 60 National Board…

The Academic Pathways of People Learning Engineering Survey (APPLES2) was administered in Spring 2008 to undergraduate engineering students at 21 American universities. Students took the 10-minute online survey that asked mainly multiple choice questions related to their undergraduate engineering experience. A final optional open-ended question…