Despite advances to move anatomy education away from its didactic history, there is a continued need for students to contextualize their studies to make learning more meaningful. This article investigates authentic learning in the context of an inquiry-based approach to learning human gross anatomy. Utilizing a case-study design with three groups…

Recently, theorists have raised concerns that pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has become "a stale metaphor" that disregards diversity and equity, offers little to help teachers address students' misconceptions, and portrays knowledge as "in the head" versus in practice. We refute these notions using grounded theory to…

Children often learn information in a context that is vastly different to the one in which they are asked to recall or use that information. Despite this, little is known about the effect of context change on children's recall of educational information. Here, 197 5- and 6-year-olds were taught the same interactive lesson in their classroom or on…

Much of the literature on science teaching suggests that elementary teachers lack relevant prior experiences with science. This study begins to reframe the deficit approach to research in science teaching by privileging the experiences elementary teachers have had with science--both in and out of schools--throughout their lives. Our work uses…

Research Findings: Research has demonstrated the developmental and educational benefits of play. Despite these benefits, teacher-directed academic instruction is prominent in kindergarten. There is increasing acknowledgment in curricula and policies of the challenges presented by a lack of play in classrooms and the need to support academic…

Misconceptions are the "the old, the bad, and the ugly" prior knowledge, ideas or conceptions that the learners have that hinder their further learning in science. Several types of misconceptions that undergraduate students hold about reaction coordinate diagrams (from here on we use the term "reaction coordinate diagrams" and…

Research on the design of learning environments for K-12 science education has been informed by two bodies of literature: inquiry-based science and Constructionism. Inquiry-based science has emphasized engagement in activities that reflect authentic scientific practices. Constructionism has focused on designing intuitively accessible authoring…

This inquiry explores Integral Theory's prospective value to assist interpreting student teachers' communicated awarenesses for how they make sense of their own pedagogies, acknowledging student teachers' partial existence within post-secondary teacher education circumstances along with emerging twenty-first century conditions. Accordingly, this…

Within the United States, publicly funded pre-Kindergarten (pre-K) is a borderland of teacher practice--somewhere between early childhood and Elementary approaches to pedagogy. For pre-K teachers, this can mean negotiating many different, and oft-competing conceptions of what curriculum and practice should look like in order to support the…

Specific acts of problem solving with rates and ratios were interpreted using a journey metaphor derived from Skemp's (1979) construct of director systems. To successfully undertake a problem solving journey a learner must recognise their starting place (present state), have a sense of destination (goal state), and co-ordinate sub-routes along the…

In this paper, co-musicking in teaching is discussed on the basis of findings from a study on pop band and piano teaching. We understand co-musicking as collaboration between music-makers, including pupils. For this study, we chose to focus on the actions that teachers and student teachers take during pupils' performance of a piece of music in a…

Students, educators, and schools across the country have been presented with challenges as a result of rigorous standards and high-complexity tests. The problem addressed in this case study was that teachers in a rural middle school in a southeastern state were preparing students to take a new high-stakes state-mandated assessment in English…

The effects of prior encodings of manipulatives (red and blue plastic chips) on children's ability to use them as representations of quantity were tested. First graders (N = 73) were assigned to four conditions in which the encoding of plastic chips was experimentally manipulated. All children then participated in an addition activity that relied…

The prevalence of diabetes and other pathophysiological conditions has been correlated with the incidence of obesity. A large portion of an adult community in the northwestern United States suffers from excessive weight that has been linked to premature mortality rates and certain forms of diabetes. Excess calories from carbohydrate have been…

This study investigates teacher responses to a common set of high potential instances of student mathematical thinking to better understand the role of the teacher in shaping meaningful mathematical discourse in their classrooms. Teacher responses were coded using a scheme that disentangles the teacher move from other aspects of the teacher…