Developing exercises that lead students to use higher order thinking skills is a challenge for faculty in any discipline. An excellent way to approach this problem is to use the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy as a guide. In the taxonomy, the highest level of learning is to create. The author describes an assignment that builds on the use of…

The purpose of this study was to understand how students utilized multiple representations to learn and explain science concepts, in this case the human breathing mechanism. The study was conducted with Grade 11 students in a human biology class. Semistructured interviews and a two-tier diagnostic test were administered to evaluate students'…

The research reported here was focussed on accessing the perceptions of pre-service teachers regarding the critical factors which support highly effective learning in schools in the United Kingdom. Their perceptions were arranged into a taxonomy so that they can be used as a starting point for their reflections on the observations they make of…

The purpose of this study was to examine kindergarten teachers' and children's perceptions of their relationships following a person-centred approach, and to describe patterns of relationships between them. 67 Kindergarten teachers and 403 children completed two measures designed to explore their perceptions of their relations. Four patterns of…

Determining which dimensions of social classification are culturally significant is a developmental challenge. Some suggest this is accomplished by differentially privileging intrinsic visual cues over nonintrinsic cues (Atran, 1990; Gil-White, 2001), whereas others point to the role of noun labels as more general promoters of kind-based reasoning…

The concept of moderate learning difficulties (MLD) is not clearly understood in its definition and in its general use. Nevertheless, as a distinct area of special educational needs (SEN) this category has constituted about a quarter of all of those pupils identified as having SEN in England. This paper reports the analysis of findings from an…

Since 2010, the whole national cohort Key Stage 2 (KS2) National Curriculum test in science in England has been replaced with a sampling test taken by pupils at the age of 11 from a nationally representative sample of schools annually. The study reported in this paper compares the performance of different subgroups of the samples (classified by…

This study explores whether the religious background of students affects their opinions about and attitudes to engaging with scientific explanations of the origins of the universe and of life. The study took place in four English secondary schools representing three different contexts (Christian faith-based; non-faith with majority Muslim…

Previous educational studies have investigated the impact of skills and contextual influences on adolescents' citizenship participation and efficacy. Yet, we know little about how adolescents give meaning to their citizenship efficacy. This study explores the narratives of 27 adolescents in the Netherlands on their citizenship efficacy. A thematic…

In a world that is becoming increasingly more visual, there is a greater need to educate children to better understand images. A school subject that deals directly with image understanding is visual arts. This article discusses an interdisciplinary approach to promote art understanding, within a multimodal environment that combines art and music.…

Schools are under increasing pressure to reclassify their English learner (EL) students to "fluent English proficient" status as quickly as possible. This article examines timing to reclassification among Latino ELs in four distinct linguistic instructional environments: English immersion, transitional bilingual, maintenance bilingual,…

Group and team tasks are the culminating outputs of student learning in team and collaborative learning environments. How they are conceived and designed, therefore, can directly determine the success of the pedagogical strategy. A key design issue for creating effective tasks is how best to focus student knowledge, observation, and analysis…

This research focuses on gaining a better understanding of how students negatively impact other students' classroom experience. More specifically, this research develops a typology of disruptive student behavior, including frequency of occurrence and the perceived magnitude of the disruption from a student perspective. Students also provide…

The "Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act" (the "Clery Act") is a consumer right-to-know law originally passed by Congress in 1900. The law requires colleges and universities receiving federal student aid to publish annually their security-related policies and crime statistics. The…

An individual student's educational experience often includes multiple transitions: progressing through K12 school levels, transitioning to postsecondary education or the workforce, and sometimes changing schools. It is important for both the student and the school systems that course information be easily understood and transferrable through each…