This participant observation research study explored relationships between the role of guided reading and in-school writing of three proficient first-grade literacy learners during the first eight months of the 2007-08 school-year. Portraits of each student as a literacy learner were developed through case studies. Those individual case studies…

This article advances a framework for early language and literacy development among young English language learners (ELLs). A dual-language book project undertaken in partnership with a local elementary school provides a context within which to address children's need to negotiate language, culture, and identity as they transition and make meaning…

This study examines the nature of small-group discussion and explores how it fosters oral academic discourse socialization in a TESOL postgraduate course. The participants included four native-English speaking and six non-native English Speaking postgraduate students at a state university in the U.S. The findings revealed that small-group…

This reflective and conceptual article, which is based on a literature review and the subjective experiences of the authors, discusses the simultaneous collaborative delivery of 3 sections of an introductory undergraduate-level course in social work. Each section of the course consisted of roughly 100 students. The instructors strived to produce…

Phonological awareness is the ability to attend to and recognize the sound structure of a language. This skill is known to be important for learning to spell and read and a lack of phonological awareness skills is linked with reading difficulties. Previous research has shown phonological awareness training improves phonological awareness skills,…

The "Herman Method"[TM] teaches reading in small groups of up to three students. The curriculum provides instruction in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension, while also teaching spelling and writing. It contains 20 modules of instruction through a fifth grade level. Each module includes a reading,…

In this article, the author describes an activity that involves classroom seating arrangements and allows students to talk about some of the implications of classroom furniture arrangements. The purpose of the activity is to provide students with an opportunity to think about ordinary things in their lives and push them to find connections between…

This study examined teachers' actions during small-group guided instruction as they scaffolded students' understanding. The data suggest that expert teachers use a process that has four components: questions to check for understanding, prompts for cognitive and metacognitive work, cues to alter the learners' attention, and direct explanations. As…

The Illinois Initiative on Transparency in Learning and Teaching is a grassroots assessment project designed to promote students' conscious understanding of how they learn and to enable faculty to gather, share, and promptly benefit from data about students' learning by coordinating their efforts across disciplines, institutions, and countries.…

In engaging lectures, also referred to as broken or interactive lectures, students are given short periods of lecture followed by "breaks" that can consist of 1-min papers, problem sets, brainstorming sessions, or open discussion. While many studies have shown positive effects when engaging lectures are used in undergraduate settings,…

This theoretical paper attempts to clarify design issues that the field of education has encountered in the context of OER (Open Educational Resources), Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and increased emphasis on informal learning, as examined through the lens of the Interaction Equivalency Theorem. An overview of the core concepts of the…

Joan Garfield reflects on cooperative learning, 20 years after publishing an article on this topic in the inaugural issue of "Journal of Statistics Education" ("JSE") (Garfield 1993). Here, she writes that as she re-read the article, she realized that she still agrees with most of what she originally wrote regarding the use of…

A study was conducted in 26 Head Start classrooms with 264 children to compare the effect of a read aloud plus extension activities intervention over a control group to the effect of a read aloud only intervention over a control group on preschool children's vocabulary. Children were assessed before and after the intervention on target vocabulary…

A portion of high-school students do not experience success or encounter extenuating circumstances that do not allow them to attend a traditional comprehensive high school to complete their high-school diploma requirements, so they enroll in some kind of alternative education to complete these requirements. These alternative education…

The purpose of this dissertation study was to explore African-American women's perceptions of undergraduate STEM classroom experiences, and the ways in which those experiences have supported or hindered their persistence in physics majors. The major research question guiding this study was: How do African-American women perceive the climate and…