Developing countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on schools, educational materials and teachers, but relatively little is known about how effective these expenditures are at increasing students' years of completed schooling and, more importantly, the skills that they learn while in school. This paper examines studies published…

Teachers are forced to use state-adopted texts, approved materials and methods in order to facilitate learning. The creativity of designing a lesson plan that meets the needs of each student, while fostering the imagination and creativity, can be all but lost when constrained by such parameters. So what can teachers do to enhance the learning…

Brain science is a new and complex field. It has emerged with the application of new technologies for brain imaging like Magnetic Resonance Images (MRIs) and Computer Axial Tomography (CAT) scans. Since the brain is the site for learning, educators stand to benefit from this knowledge when it is applied to improving methods of teaching or…

A quantitative method of mapping the web usage of an innovative educational portal is applied to analyze the behaviour of users of the COSMOS Science Education Portal. The COSMOS Portal contains user-generated resources (that are uploaded by its users). It has been designed to support a science teacher's search, retrieval and access to both,…

Support for intellectual freedom, a concept codified in the American Library Association's Library Bill of Rights and Code of Ethics, is one of the core tenets of modern librarianship. According to the most recent interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights, academic librarians are encouraged to incorporate the principles of intellectual freedom…

The most successful school library media specialists are those who collaborate with teachers as full partners in the instructional process. Without assertive action by the school library media specialist, however, school administrators and teachers are likely to be more aware of the media specialist's administrative role than the roles of teacher,…

Hundreds of thousands of children and youth with disabilities across the country are receiving secondary transition services. Secondary transition is the process of preparing students with disabilities for life after they leave high school, including participation in post-secondary education or training, employment and independent living.…

The development of the resource file is a common experience in teacher preparation programs. The author examines strategies for transforming what has been a project composed of physical resources to one emphasizing digital resources. Methods for finding, tagging, storing and retrieving resources are explored.

Despite the growing availability and popularity of simulations and other active teaching techniques, many instructors may be deterred from using simulations because of the potentially high costs involved. Instructors could spend a preponderance of their time and resources developing and executing simulations, but such an approach is not necessary.…

Social scientists have long worked to replicate real-world phenomena in their research and teaching environments. Unlike our biophysical science colleagues, we are faced with an area of study that is not governed by the laws of physics and other more predictable relationships. As a result, social scientists, and international studies scholars more…

It can be quite alarming (and eye-opening) to see exactly how many of the grades students receive are based on their behaviors rather than their learning. Students should be assessed on what they know and can use rather than on their behavior. The reality, unfortunately, is that the opposite is often the case. Grades for students who work hard are…

The English Language Learner (ELL) Summer Camp in Worcester, Massachusetts--an intensive six-week program that served middle school and high school students from Worcester Public Schools (WPS)--was the product of a five-way partnership that included the school district, higher education institutions (Latino Education Institute [LEI] at Worcester…

Bridge21 is an innovative approach to learning for secondary education that was originally conceptualised as part of a social outreach intervention in the authors' third-level institution whereby participants attended workshops at a dedicated learning space on campus focusing on a particular model of technology-mediated group-based learning. This…

We take an innovative approach to estimating student mathematics learning in the sixth grade of three African countries. The study reinforces the notion that beyond the quality of the teaching process in classrooms, national contextual factors are important in understanding the contribution that schooling makes to student performance. Our approach…

The PISA project has steadily increased its influence on the educational discourse and educational policies in the now 70 participating countries. The educational debate has become global, and the race to improve PISA-rankings has become high priority in many countries. For governments the PISA-test is a high-stake test. Governments are blamed for…