When children of diverse disabilities and students with ELL rulings are included in traditional classrooms, regular education teachers face a dilemma: How to teach the standard curriculum and teach the new inclusion students? How do they teach students with different heritages and linguistic backgrounds? Differentiated Instruction (DI) is content,…

Background/Context: Because of its special education association, differentiated instruction (DI) is a topic of concern for many educators working with culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) learners, whereby bilingual, multicultural, and culturally responsive teaching (CRT) is considered more appropriate for responding to cultural and…

Creativity is socially constructed and is not an objective fact at all. How do teachers perceive students' creativity and how can they foster students' creative learning? From two case studies, one in higher education and a second on iPad-classrooms in schools, the paper reflects on didactical concepts for creativity using mobile devices.…

In this essay, Cathy Sandeen states that the new postsecondary landscape requires looking at higher education as a system that provides multiple pathways in and through the various parts of the system, all with the goal of helping students complete a postsecondary degree, credential, or certificate. Sandeen observes two strengths in professional…

This paper summarizes how collaborative online projects (COPs) are used to facilitate science content-area learning for English Learners of Hispanic origin. This is a Mexico-USA partnership project funded by the National Science Foundation. A COP is a 10-week thematic science unit, completely online, and bilingual (Spanish and English) designed to…

Originating from the literature on resiliency, adult learning, and professional development, this qualitative study investigated how the relationship between resiliency and adult learning influenced professional development in one suburban-rural school district in Litchfield County, Connecticut. Data represent findings on the perceptions of…

The K-8 Cajon Valley Union School District (Cajon Valley USD) is one of forty-two school districts in the greater San Diego, California metropolitan area. Serving approximately 16,000 students, the Cajon Valley USD is extremely diverse; 36 percent of students are Hispanic, 46 percent are white, 7 percent are African American, and many students are…

The purpose of this quasi-experimental non-equivalent control group study was to test theories of constructivism and motivation, along with research-based teaching practices of differentiating instruction and instructing within a child's Zone of Proximal Development, in measuring the effect of computer-aided instruction on fifth grade students'…

This case study explored the use of students' personal mobile devices in the classroom for learning. The context was a district with an initiative called Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT), whereby students regularly utilized their personal technology as part of the curriculum. The focus of this study was to better understand how students' personal…

Given the rising prevalence rates of autism spectrum disorders (ASD), schools are serving an increasing number of students with ASD (Scull & Winkler, 2011). Researchers have highlighted active engagement as a critical component of effective interventions for students with ASD (National Research Council, 2001), yet there is limited research…

Providing a meaningful and experiential learning environment for all students has long created a concern for alternate ways to teach students who are reportedly demonstrating non-mastery on state standardized assessments. As the benchmark for showing successful academic achievement increases, so does the need for discovering effective ways for…

This chapter focuses on the instruction of diverse students in mainstream classrooms. The first part summarizes academic achievement of diverse students from different ethnicity, gender, language and social class. The second part discusses the characteristics of different diverse instruction. The third part suggests specific instructional…

The problem examined in this study: Does the majority of teachers use rigorous teaching and testing practices? The purpose of this qualitative exploratory case study was to explore the classroom techniques of six effective teachers who use rigorous teaching and testing practices. The hypothesis for this study is that the examination of the…

Over the past decade, it has been argued that technology-enhanced learning (TEL) could respond to the needs of the new knowledge society and transform learning. However, despite isolated achievements, TEL has not succeeded in revolutionizing education and learning processes. Most current TEL initiatives still take a centralized technology-push…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of explicitly differentiated reading instruction groups on eighth-grade students' achievement, behavior, and engagement in a school seeking to reestablish adequate yearly progress benchmarks. The results of this study supported student participation in explicitly differentiated reading…