Peer coaching provides an attractive alternative to traditional professional development for promoting classroom quality in a sustainable, cost-effective manner by creating a collaborative teaching community. This exploratory study describes the development and evaluation of the Colleague Observation And CoacHing (COACH) program, a peer coaching…

This article reports on student preschool teachers' views of science and its role in preschool. Three cohorts of students have been given a written questionnaire with open-ended questions before and after a one-semester course including science (specifically Chemistry and Physics) in a 3.5-year preschool teacher programme in Sweden. The science…

Drawing by learners can be an effective way to develop memory and generate visual models for higher-order skills in biology, but students are often reluctant to adopt drawing as a study method. We designed a nonclassroom intervention that instructed introductory biology college students in a drawing method, minute sketches in folded lists (MSFL),…

To evaluate the willingness of teachers to incorporate aquaponics in the classroom, we engaged teachers in a 6-week project. Participants in the experimental group maintained small-scale aquaponic systems. All teachers completed pretests and posttests, and exit surveys. Both groups (experimental and control) scored significantly higher on the…

We examined whether a 12-week leisure education program could promote leisure autonomy and leisure competence and reduce stress in older adults. Forty subjects were randomly assigned to either an experimental group or a control group. Before the experiment, pretest data were collected using leisure autonomy, leisure competence, and stress scales.…

This study evaluated the effects of a cross-age peer learning program targeting vocabulary and comprehension in kindergarten and fourth-grade classrooms with substantial proportions of English Learners (ELs). The study followed a quasi-experimental design with 12 classrooms (6 kindergarten and 6 fourth grade) in the intervention group and 12…

This article deals with the problem of student dropout during the first year in a higher education institution. To date, no model on a budget has been developed and tested to prevent dropout among Engineering Students. This case study was conducted among first-year students taking evening classes in two practical engineering colleges in Israel.…

Background: Previous studies underscore the need to improve caregiver-child interactions in early child care centers. Objective: In this study we used a randomized controlled trial to examine whether a 5-week video feedback training can improve six key interactive skills of caregivers in early child care centers: Sensitive responsiveness, respect…

The purpose of the study is to explore how elementary preservice teachers' mathematics-science integrated teaching strategies changed as a result of participating in exemplary interdisciplinary activities with multiple themes across school curricula. The participating elementary preservice teachers (n = 28) were recruited for this study from the…

Background: Development of scientific understanding of secondary school students is considered to be one of the goals of environmental education. However, it is not quite clear what instructional strategies and what other factors contribute to the effectiveness of environmental education programs promoting this goal. Purpose: The aim was to…

Although scalable programs, such as online courses, have the potential to reach broad audiences, they may pose challenges to evaluating learners' knowledge and skills. Automated scoring offers a possible solution. In the current paper, we describe the process of creating and testing an automated means of scoring a validated measure of teachers'…

While the effects of simulation-based courses on the knowledge of participating students may be marginal in relation to standard lecture and discussion-based courses, this article argues that the greatest leverage is gained by increasing participating students' level of interest in the subject of study and in politics more broadly. Participants…

The author argues that general education teacher candidates must learn to "­re-start" art to empower them with the skills needed to realize art's promise within their future classrooms. Entry/exit surveys completed by candidates ­revealed that an art methods course corrected misconceptions about the nature of creativity and improved…

Aim/Purpose: Students face many challenges improving their soft skills such as critical thinking. This paper offers one possible solution to this problem. Background: This paper considers one method of enhancing critical thinking through a problem-solving game called the Coffee Shop. Problem-solving is a key component to critical thinking, and…

The study was conducted to reveal the effects of the instruction of different problem-solving strategies on the proportional reasoning skills of students in solving proportional problems in the 6th grade math's class. Quasi-experimental research model with pretest-posttest control group was employed in the study. For eight class hours, the…