In this article, the author shares what she has learned about interactive field trips to the local museum and offers tips for success.

It was years after this author's AP Art History course in high school, and two years after college. She and some friends decided to fill a day during the Thanksgiving visits appreciating fine art. Prior to that AP course her senior year of high school, touring an art museum had seemed like the equivalent of going to the dentist. But after…

Purpose: This study aims to improve the understanding of the learning and development that occurs during initial and subsequent role transitions within knowledge intensive workplaces. Design/methodology/approach: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 19 knowledge workers in a multinational company and the learning experiences of new…

We argue in this article for greater role for improvisation in the music classroom. Based on an extensive examination of scholarship about improvisational practices, we propose three conceptualizations--ability, culture, experience--that can serve to guide the teaching of improvisation. When considered as an "ability," improvisation is a…

While the study of threshold concepts is a growing area of research, their identification has not proven to be an easy process. However, identification matters because of the potential impact of threshold concepts on the learning experiences of students. A dialogue amongst lecturers and/or students is common to the literature on identification of…

This book provides practitioners and scholars with a number of practical tools for studying and implementing democratic learning processes within schools, and theorizes these tools in relation to current developmental learning and democratic theory. Three dimensions of knowledge are framed--foundational, expert, and personal--and the place of each…

The increased use of and demand for technology in early childhood education classrooms and programs creates new challenges for practicing and preservice early educators being asked to employ such technology within their teaching. Early childhood teacher education programs have struggled to meet these demands for teaching their students how to…

The introduction to this Special Topic Collection has two parts. To provide background and context for the articles in the collection, Part 1 tells the story of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study program at the National Center for Education Statistics. It offers an abridged history of this program and describes the designs of the two national…

The purpose of this qualitative dissertation is to explore the lived experience of online students. This study provided real-world accounts of students who graduated from graduate programs offered at both online non-profit and for-profit institutions. The grand research question is "What are the lived experiences of successful graduate…

Since the introduction of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in 2010, the education world has experienced a paradigm shift in the pedagogical expectations of educators, and there have been a decidedly mixed results on the implementation of the new standards. This qualitative study explored the experiences of several school administrators…

With the emergence of innovative mobile-based tools, new opportunities have been made to enhance the quality of language learning. Keeping this in mind, the current study aimed to investigate the impact of a flipped classroom on enhancing EFL learners' pragmatic competence. To this end, 60 EFL learners from two universities in Iran were assigned…

Learning a foreign language could either be problematic or simplistic. For those who have learnt a foreign language (e.g. English) for along period of time but no significant progress it might be discouraging. On the other hand, for the successful learner it might be just an "affordable price" to get through. This paper draws on a…

The research in this "Learning by Doing" study focuses on a special type of doing that applies to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. In the early stages of humankind, the act of doing was essential for survival and drove the evolution of technology. As was true in ancient times, knowledge and the ability…

Deeper learning promotes students' active engagement in learning environments, so they can continuously explore, reflect and produce information to build complex knowledge structures. Consequently, deeper learning has become a major focus of scholarly investigation and debate. Multiple studies have been conducted to describe the…

Our students are not a tabula rasa in classes. These varied learners imbibe new information in relevance to others and reaffirm their own concepts. Quite often, in this journey of forming new connections, inadvertently, misconceptions are retained and may be reinforced if not corrected early. Students come to learning situations with preconceived…