The college readiness and success of all students continues to be of growing national concern due to the increasing number of jobs requiring a postsecondary degree (Gonzalez, 2012; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2012). The Obama administration formalized this concern into policy, making college and career readiness for all a national education…

This rigorous literature review analyzed how 28 U.S.-based research studies conducted between 2001 and 2015 have defined, described, and measured changes in teaching practices related to implementation of Differentiated Instruction (DI) in P-12 classrooms. Research questions examined frameworks that defined DI, classroom operationalization of DI,…

Students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) consistently lag behind their peers academically and behaviorally, are likely to be excluded from school, drop out more frequently, and face higher incarceration rates and a host of other negative outcomes as adults. Federal policy has played a key role in (a) ensuring that students with…

"Data-drive instruction can distort the way reading is taught, harming the students who need high-quality instruction the most," Susan B. Neuman concludes from her research team's two years of observation in nine low-income New York City schools. She describes how some students are reminded that they are "failures" every day by…

A critical aspect of rural research is carefully defining and describing the rural context. This is particularly important in rural special education research because different definitions of rural may influence resource allocation, grant funding eligibility, and/or research findings. In order to highlight the importance of operationalizing rural,…

This article focuses on the practical, ontological, and epistemological similarities and differences between global education and participatory action research (PAR). The paper starts by presenting classical definitions of action research, highlighting their similarities with the ideas of global education. Considering the aim of global education…

A misconception exists that validity may refer only to the "interpretation" of test scores and not to the "uses" of those scores. The development and evolution of validity theory illustrate test score interpretation was a primary focus in the earliest days of modern testing, and that validating interpretations derived from test…

Language mixing in a given class is often avoided in bilingual education because of the generally held belief that "one subject" should be taught in only "one language" and "one person" should stick to "one language" in order to minimize confusion. Here, we compared the effects of mixing two languages and…

The concept of spirituality is influenced by culture and the values and mores of Brazil, and though not directly linked to religion it actually grows from the same roots. This paper examines spirituality in education from the perspective of a humanistic psychology framework expressed as an ideal of the adequate personality or healthy personality.…

Participation is a central aspect of human functioning and a key focus of research and practice in the intellectual disability field. However, there is not an accepted definition of participation that guides research and practice. To inform the development of a definition, a scoping review of the intellectual disability literature from 2001-2015…

The aim of the present paper is to awake awareness of the term "sustainable development" and show that the very term is not understood in a unilateral way. A discrepancy of perception and thus understanding of the notion of sustainability blurs its meaning. Numerous scholars and researchers use the term sustainable or sustainability to…

This article discusses the depoliticization of the language of social justice, multiculturalism, and multicultural education in this moment of neoliberalism and multiculturalism, and in each section includes both national and international examples of depolicizaton to point out the pervasiveness of depolicization throughout the world.…

This introduction to the symposium on Teacher Leadership describes how a group of teachers have developed a definition of teacher leadership as a stance. The article explores how prior definitions of teacher leadership tend to focus on individual skills or roles. Neoliberal educational policies that emphasize market-based policy, privatization,…

The Common Core State Standards for mathematics promote ideals about learning mathematics by providing specific standards focused on conceptual understanding and incorporating practices in which students must participate to develop conceptual understanding. Thus, how we define learning is pivotal because our current definition isn't aligned with…

Instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) has been referenced in the larger field of the SLA literature for over two and a half decades. Currently, there are several theoretical underpinnings accounting for processes assumed to play a role in ISLA and quite an impressive number of studies have empirically addressed some aspect(s) of ISLA.…