In a Spring 2011 survey about professional development opportunity needs, Austin Independent School District teachers and campus administrators most often requested training in the state's new academic assessment and using technology.

There is no disputing that for high school students to be college and career ready, they need adequate time to learn, and individualized attention to meet each student's academic goals, learning styles, and social needs. Over the past decade, Education Resource Strategies (ERS) has partnered with urban schools and districts to improve their use of…

Introduction: Computers and other technological instruments in general have become a more common practice in our schools nowadays, and Computer-assisted instruction (CAI) has been recently provided in various formats from kindergartens on. It can help children at-risk for learning disabilities. Method: This study investigated the effectiveness of…

Background: Teacher-related factors such as gender, experience, conceptions related to mathematics, instructional practices have effects with various magnitudes on students' mathematics achievement. Classroom related factors such as class size, class climate and limitations to teaching and their relation to mathematics achievement have also been…

Many graduates of various levels and disciplines appear unable to practically apply their knowledge in problem solving situations. However, few education systems are adopting modern education practices such as visualization skills that intrinsically motivate and engage learners and are at the same time flexible enough to consider students'…

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has placed a significant focus on standards. Understandably, classroom teachers are focused on effectively covering their content area standards and are often reluctant to add information literacy skills to their lessons because they see no direct connection to the state achievement tests. However, a close…

During the 2009-2010 school year, Marzano Research Laboratory (MRL) was commissioned by Promethean Ltd. to conduct a second year evaluation study of the effects of Promethean ActivClassroom on student academic achievement. This report describes the findings from the second year study along with aggregate findings from the first and second year…

Ensuring that teachers are rich in data, rich in information, and rich in the skills that enable them to improve student achievement requires focused attention from leaders at all levels, including federal policymakers. For federal policy to best support teachers' use of data to prepare all students for college and careers, there must be a…

This research study examined "prospective elementary science teachers' epistemological beliefs". Forty-nine prospective elementary science teachers participated into research. The research was designed in both quantitative and qualitative manner, within the context of "Special Methods in Science Teaching I" course.…

We used four different methods to determine the best means of assessing over 200 preservice elementary teachers' growth in knowledge of models and their use in K-8 classrooms while participating in the Science Capstone course that focused on the unifying themes of models in science. Each assessment method probed a different aspect of models (from…

The present paper reports on an approximate replication of Foster's (1998) study on the negotiation of meaning. Foster investigated the interactional adjustments produced by L2 English learners working on different types of language learning tasks in a classroom setting. The replication study duplicates the methods of data collection and data…

Background: Based on the idea that students remember best what is presented last, the lesson closure is commonly identified as an important component of effective teaching and has recently surfaced as a routine practice of expert teachers in sport. Despite its link to both effective and expert instruction, the lesson closure has seen scarce…

A typical card sort is an activity in which students are given a set of cards with a single concept written on each card and asked to organize the cards by grouping related concepts. The nontraditional card sorts described in this article foster critical thinking and add elements of inquiry as students use them to develop flowcharts for complex…

The idea of using mathematical research in the classroom to collect real data has been spoken about within education for many years. The question is, why should teachers bother with real data from their students' worlds and how do they actually put it into practice in the classroom? When using the mathematical research strategy for collecting,…

The purpose of the International Computer and Information Literacy Study 2013 (ICILS 2013) is to investigate, in a range of countries, the ways in which young people are developing "computer and information literacy" (CIL) to support their capacity to participate in the digital age. To achieve this aim, the study will assess student…