Design within primary and secondary schools has been increasingly emphasized over the past decade. As a response to this increased interest, qualitative research examining students' cognitive processes involved in the practices of design has been on the rise. These studies have commonly employed the concurrent think-aloud research methodology to…

In this paper, we provide an overview of the current efforts in maker education, supported by a review of empirical studies. Our synthesis will inform the community about learning outcomes, potential and common issues, challenges, resources, and future research direction regarding maker education.

Formative feedback, aimed at helping students to improve their work, is an important factor in learning. Many tools that offer programming exercises provide automated feedback on student solutions. We have performed a systematic literature review to find out what kind of feedback is provided, which techniques are used to generate the feedback, how…

Situated within the historical and current state of writing and adolescent literacy research, this systematic literature review screened 3504 articles to determine the prevalent themes in current research on writing tasks in content-area classrooms. Each of the 3504 studies was evaluated and coded using seven methodological quality indicators. The…

Although research has explored teacher competencies in K-12 blended and online learning, it has not specified which competencies are appropriate to an online or digital medium, which refer to blending in-person with online experiences, or which are generic--applicable in any teaching modality. This article explores selected K-12 online and blended…

Given the diversity and complexity of education game mechanisms and topics, this article contributes to a theoretical understanding of how game mechanisms "map" to educational topics through inquiry-based learning. Namely, the article examines the presence of evolution through natural selection (ENS) in digital games. ENS is a…

Spelling is one of the most challenging areas for students with learning disabilities (LD), and improving spelling outcomes for these students is of high importance. In this synthesis, we examined the effects of spelling and reading interventions on spelling outcomes for students with LD in Grades K through 12. A systematic search of peer-reviewed…

The interest towards research on learning games is continuously growing, however, the integration of games in teaching is still a somewhat unexplored area of study. In this qualitative literature review, we were interested in the pedagogical foundations that underpin empirical studies and especially in the teacher's role/activities regarding the…

We conducted this systematic literature review to explore the current evidence base of instructional choice, a low-intensity, teacher-delivered strategy to support academic engagement and decrease challenging behaviors. Specifically, we focused on school-based settings, applying quality indicators (QIs) and evidence-based standards of the Council…

Dictionary studies have suggested that nearly half of the English lexicon have multiple meanings. It is not yet clear, however, if second language learners reading English texts will encounter words with multiple meanings to the same degree. This study investigates the use of words with multiple meanings in an authentic English novel. Two samples…

Inference ability is considered central to discourse processing and has been shown to be important across models of reading comprehension. To evaluate the impact of inference instruction, a meta-analysis of 25 inference studies in Grades K-12 was conducted. Results showed that inference instruction was effective for increasing students' general…

A review of the current research literature demonstrates that teaching for social justice has been accepted by the research community as best practice for students, especially diverse students from traditionally marginalized populations and communities. However, best practices do no practical good if they are not implemented into real classroom…

In 2008, Browder and colleagues published a meta-analysis on mathematics instruction for learners with significant cognitive disabilities and found that most skills taught to these students were only from two of the five strands recommended by the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics (i.e., Number and Operations, and Measurement). A review…

There has been considerable interest in examining the educational potential of playing video games. One crucial element, however, has traditionally been left out of these discussions--namely, children's learning through making their own games. In this article, we review and synthesize 55 studies from the last decade on making games and learning.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the evidence base for using computer-assisted instruction (CAI) to improve the reading comprehension of students with learning disabilities (LD). Twelve peer-reviewed studies (seven comparison group studies, five single-case studies) met selection criteria and were evaluated according to the relevant…