The teacher evaluation process has been an area of study for decades because of its complexity. Going back to one-room schoolhouses, teaching has always been an isolated profession--usually a room, a teacher, and students. Other colleagues or administrators are not participants in the classroom most of the time, which creates difficulties for…

Most of the world's population believe in the idea of learning styles (Dekker et al., 2012; Howard-Jones, 2014; Macdonald et al., 2017; Torrijos-Muelas et al., 2021). The theory of learning styles conveys individuals learn best in a certain way (e.g., visual, auditory, or kinesthetic). An extension of this theory is the hypothesis that an…

YouTube viewers watch over a billion hours of videos monthly and have multiple choices on professional development resources. User-generated content (UGC) on YouTube is created by individuals instead of brands and uses different typologies of video production styles. This study examined 80 YouTube microlearning videos that provided insight into…

The "ACTFL Performance Descriptors for Language Learners" are designed to describe language performance that is the result of explicit instruction in an instructional setting. A companion to the "ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines," a document that describes broad, general language proficiency regardless of when, where or how…

Teachers' questioning is a key practice that influences student learning, yet not all teachers' questioning is equally effective, and fine-grained analyses uncovering the details of teachers' questioning are scarce. My study investigated the types of questions asked by three in-service elementary school math teachers, the associated levels of…

Experiential learning is a child-centered approach to education designed to minimize the role of authority, shift the power dynamic away from the teacher, and place children at the center in curriculum activities. In direct instruction, teachers play a leading role in constructing and delivering lessons to students. Direct instruction occurs when…

Professional development is ubiquitous in education, with over 90% of teachers engaging in professional development activities, yet often with limited perceived impact on their practice. This dissertation situates itself at the critical juncture of professional development quality and teacher self-efficacy, investigating the transformative…

The algorithm for fraction multiplication is relatively easy to memorize and implement with accuracy. The simplicity of the algorithm masks the conceptual complexity involved in making sense of what fraction multiplication means in quantitative situations. One important interpretation of fraction multiplication involves fraction composition,…

The ability to relate physical concepts and phenomena to multiple mathematical representations--and to move fluidly between these representations--is a critical outcome expected of physics instruction. In upper-division quantum mechanics, students must work with multiple symbolic notations, including some that they have not previously encountered.…

Within physics education research (PER), resource theory has proven to be a useful framework for investigating knowledge and learning and informing instructional design. To analyze learning over longer timescales and across cases, PER scholars must first identify and describe the resources activated within and across physics contexts and domains.…

Rudolf Steiner's international Waldorf education is comparatively under-researched for a 100-year-old education movement which thrives globally. What is further unknown in academic educational circles is the specific study of the "feeling-life," the middle period of childhood in Waldorf education, of children aged 7 through 14. This…

The blog and distance learning: the former can enhance, enlighten, and elevate the educational experience for the student and the teaching experience for the instructor. And blogs are especially suited for the asynchronous environment where nearly everything is written and remains throughout the course, so students can continually refer to the…

Labor-based grading: for many instructors in the world of distance learning this is a new concept, yet it is one that is rapidly growing in acceptance and popularity. First introduced in 1993 by English professor Peter Elbow, the premise of labor-based grading is that instructors weigh assignments based on how much labor--how much…

In this article, we intend to illustrate the notion, practice, and evaluation methods and results related to building an effective, efficient, and equitable early care and education (ECE) system. We point out the dominant approach, in practice and evaluation, of focusing on a single ECE program to improve ECE, propose a model of developing an ECE…

The social foundations of education (SFE), an interdisciplinary educational field of study, occupies a tenuous position in university-based schools of education. In the era of teacher professionalization and practice-based teacher education, SFE has been relegated to the fringe and its value to teaching practice has been largely disregarded.…