Building on work that brings literacy instruction and student science learner identity together, this study addresses a gap in research related to student experiences as readers in middle school science classrooms. To understand student perceptions of pedagogical approaches to reading in science, we asked 45 middle school students to reflect on…

Hoping to increase student engagement, the author decided to re-envision his course on contemporary global issues in a "flipped" format. The results proved encouraging--to a degree. Over the course of five semesters, applying lessons gleaned from the literature, students learned how to read challenging texts outside of class and…

Contact time with students is becoming more valuable and must be utilized efficiently. Unfortunately, many students attend anatomy lectures and labs ill-prepared, and this limits efficiency. To address this issue we have created an interactive mobile app designed to facilitate the acquisition and transfer of critical anatomical knowledge in…

The present study investigated vocabulary acquisition through a commercial digital video game compared to a traditional pencil-and-paper treatment. Chosen through cluster sampling, 241 male high school students (age 12-18) participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to one of the following groups. The first group, called Readers,…

This research examined how four different animated pedagogical agent implementations, which focus on perceptual and inquiry arousal conditions of attention as defined in Keller's ARCS model of motivational design (Keller, 2009), impact English language learners' situational interest, cognitive load, and reading comprehension in online readings…

Flipped classrooms and inquiry-based learning (IBL) have each become popular in their own right, leading to a natural question: Why not combine these two great ideas? Although flipping a class usually involves students reading or watching videos before class, and IBL focuses on allowing and encouraging students to develop material on their own,…

Too often, students reach college without the learning, critical thinking, and literacy skills they need to succeed in higher education. Recent educational trends that promote teaching to the test, short reading and writing assignments, group work, and technological resources contribute to students' difficulties transitioning to college-level…

The present empirical study scrutinizes the use of short stories via computer technologies in teaching and learning English language. The objective of the study is two-fold: to examine how short stories could be used through computer programs in teaching and learning English and to collect data about students' perceptions of this technique via…

This paper reports on a new pedagogy for Chinese language teaching and learning at elementary schools through exploratory classroom instruction using Information and Communication Technologies. The study used quantitative method to collect data from two elementary schools of China. The results showed that: (1) the three-in-one pedagogy of…

Two major pieces of legislation, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004) and No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (2001) mandate that students with disabilities be placed in the Least Restrictive Environment and have access to the general education curriculum. To provide access to the general education curriculum, inclusion in general…

This paper reports on the students' experiments of using blogs to encourage themselves to do pre-class reading assignment and reflections after class. The sample in the study included five ESL (English as a Second Language) graduate students in a course of teaching methods, and 90 software engineering students in an undergraduate information…

In the process of collecting assessment data in the author's introductory sociology course, he made a startling and disappointing discovery. For the most part, students simply were not bothering to read the basics version of the introductory survey textbook that he assigned. This discovery presented him with two related challenges. First, he had…