In a 1984 essay, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago, asserted that tutoring offered "the best learning conditions we can devise" and that tutors could raise student achievement by two full standard deviations--or, in statistical parlance, two "sigmas." The influence of Bloom's two-sigma…

Purpose: Scholars are increasingly paying attention to the characteristics of effective citizenship education. The systematic use of data to maximise student learning, also called an output-driven approach, is often presented as a powerful predictor of student outcomes. However, its effectiveness has not been studied in citizenship education.…

The present contribution provides a conceptualization of teacher emotions rooted in appraisal theory and draws on several complementary theoretical perspectives to create a conceptual framework for understanding the teacher emotion-student outcome link based on three psychological mechanisms: (1) "direct transmission effects" between…

This article examines a school district's effort to create a unified culture of mathematical excellence through which everyone would know what high-quality instruction should look like and how they would shift their practices to those that aligned with their vision. This is accomplished through their Mathematics Teaching Practices Inventory…

Attention is thought to be the gateway between information and learning, yet there is much we do not understand about how students pay attention in the classroom. Leveraging ideas from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, we explore a framework for understanding attention in the classroom, organized along two key dimensions: internal/external…

Recently, a new source of data with great potential for use in the mathematics classroom has become available. The smartphones in our pockets are packed with sensors. Most phones have at a minimum global positioning, accelerometer, magnetometer, and gyroscope sensors. We give an example of the collection and analysis of global positioning sensor…

Teaching is a complex profession and feedback on teacher practices is needed for teachers' development. Many instruments are available to measure teacher practices, but little is known about their quality. This systematic review aimed to gain insight into the quality of instruments available to measure teacher practices. A systematic review based…

The evidence base for educational interventions for deaf students has been, and continues to be, called into question due to a lack of "gold standard" research available to support it. Yet the paucity of research in deaf education is not only in the volume of research that meets rigorous standards but also in its lack of attention to and…

The forgotten history of de Broglie waves as themselves artifacts of a Lorentz transform, not physical lengths and frequencies to be transformed, causes confusion for students and others. In this paper the de Broglie wavelength is derived and dependence of de Broglie frequency on velocity explained in terms of Einstein synchronized reference frame…

This essay reflects on the challenges of thinking about scale--of making sense of phenomena such as continuous professional development (CPD) at the system level, while holding on to detail at the finer grain size(s) of implementation. The stimuli for my reflections are three diverse studies of attempts at scale--an attempt to use ideas related to…

There is considerable evidence that incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading accounts for a large portion of the growth in word knowledge for both first (L1) and second (L2) language acquirers. In this paper, we evaluate the Markov Estimate of Semantic Association (MESA) technique for detecting small, incremental gains in vocabulary…

The availability of effective research-based interventions and practices within schools is a growing concern within the field of education. There remains a lack of interventions that have been fully evaluated for use within schools and by school personnel, particularly in the area of social skills interventions. Understanding the need for social…

This "Science note" arose out of practical work involving the dilution of ethanoic acid, the measurement of the pH of the diluted solutions and calculation of the acid dissociation constant, K[subscript a], for each diluted solution. The students expected the calculated values of K[subscript a] to be constant but they found that the…

We review literature on the teaching and learning of chemical kinetics at both the secondary and tertiary levels. Our aim in doing so is to summarize research literature, synthesize recommendations for future research, and suggest implications for practitioners. Two main bodies of literature emerged from the chemical kinetics education research:…

The current use of two sets of units in the UK continues to be a source of muddle and confusion. Young people are taught metric (SI) units in school but, in the outside world, still have to contend with units such as inches, feet, pounds, stones and miles. Specialist teachers and practitioners of the sciences are not blameless. This paper…