Research on problem-based learning (PBL) has tended to focus on the graduate level of education, paying less attention to the primary school level and to what is involved for students during the implementation of PBL. In this paper we take a step towards addressing this need for research by reporting findings from a descriptive, explanatory case…

This study examined the relation between exposure to shared book reading and Spanish-speaking English learners' (ELs'; n = 102) narrative production and comprehension skills in kindergarten (mean age = 6.12 years). Audio- and videotaped book-reading sessions in Spanish were coded in terms of teachers' extratextual talk and gestures. Using a silent…

High-quality writing instruction needs to permeate elementary students' in- and outside-of-school experiences. The aim of this research was to explore how teaching writing to parents may support home-school literacy connections. This qualitative case study explored parents' experiences in interactive writing sessions. The descriptive coding and…

Incidents in which program leaders confront issues of culture and race occur regularly in many youth programs. These incidents are important because they reflect powerful dimensions of youth's lived experience and bring issues of injustice and program inclusiveness to the fore. This study examined these culture-related incidents and how leaders…

This study examines whether and how an adaptive equity-oriented pedagogy can address diverse college students' needs and preferred modes of learning. Using a mixed-methods approach, we evaluated this pedagogical intervention that synthesizes democratic, assessment-driven, strengths-based, multimodal, and game-based instructional strategies. This…

Rural children are a largely understudied population in language and literacy research, despite the fact that these children often enter school with delays in their language development. Since most rural areas suffered from so-called selective rural outmigration, many parents in rural areas are lower or middle educated. The home literacy climate,…

Student Affairs serves as a viable career option for professionals working in higher education, including Latinas, who have increasingly entered as undergraduate students and found careers in student affairs. Latinas seem to be bottlenecked at midlevel, with few advancing to senior level leadership positions. According to the literature, negative…

The following report describes an assessment instrument called the Mathematics Performance and Cognition (MPAC) interview. The MPAC interview was designed to measure two outcomes of interest. It was designed to measure first and second graders' mathematics achievement in number, operations, and equality, and it was also designed to gather…

This report provides an overview of the development, implementation, and psychometric properties of a student mathematics interview designed to assess first- and second-grade student achievement and thinking processes. The student interview was conducted with 622 first- or second-grade students in 22 schools located in two public school districts…

The purpose of this qualitative single case study was to investigate the performance of a small, urban high school in the northeastern United States by examining graduation rates, attendance, test scores, and inappropriate student behavior to determine at what levels the school is at risk of losing accreditation. The selected school had declined…

This dissertation centers on the application of the mental space theory to expand our understanding of the role lexical discourse markers (LDMs) play in discourse. LDMs have been recognized by many researchers for their discourse connective function(s) (Levinson, 1983; Schiffrin, 1987; Blakemore, 1989, 2000, 2001, 2002; Fraser, 1996, 1999, 2006).…

This article discusses some of the ambiguities related to the concept of reflection in education, and presents an alternative approach for determining the focus and quality of students' reflection. Accordingly, the focus of reflection can vary from a concrete technical aspect of an experience to the broader societal context of that experience, and…

The finding that participants leave a pause between groups when attempting serial recall of temporally grouped lists has been taken to indicate access to a hierarchical representation of the list in working memory. An alternative explanation is that the dynamics of serial recall solely reflect output (rather than memorial) processes, with the…

Learning from texts requires reflection on how far one has mastered the material. Learners use such metacognitive processes to decide whether to engage in deeper learning activities or not. This article examines how the lexical surface of specialist concepts influences their mental representation. Lexical encodings that are the concise wordings of…

This article is designed to give the reader a conceptual, nontechnical overview of estimation and model fit issues in multilevel modeling (MLM). The process of MLM generally involves fitting a series of multilevel models that increase in complexity. When conducting multilevel analyses, it is important to balance the need for complexity and the…