Educating for active and informed citizenship represents a core goal of Australian education and schooling. Owing to a range of factors -- including the contested conceptual nature of citizenship and democracy -- there is reason to question the extent to which this goal is being translated into practice. Similarly, while the Australian Curriculum…

The current study examined the effects of different types of instructor comments on student engagement in an online discussion. In particular, this study examined three comment types: (1) praise-oriented comments, agreeing with students' initial messages and recapping their ideas, (2) elaboration-encouraging comments, requesting elaboration on the…

This brief applies value-added models to student surveys in the CORE Districts to explore whether social-emotional learning (SEL) surveys can be used to measure effective classroom-level supports for SEL. The authors find that classrooms differ in their effect on students' growth in self-reported SEL--even after accounting for school-level…

Embodied Labs works at the intersection of virtual reality storytelling and healthcare workforce training to create experiences where trainees learn from embodying the perspective of the patient and members of the patient's care team. Ninety-four second-year medical students were selected to pilot a virtual reality (VR) geriatric immersion prior…

Culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) offers elaborate empirical and theoretical conventions for becoming an effective teacher of diverse youth. Empathy has been found to improve classroom teachers' capacity to (re)act or respond to youth in ways that produce evidence of CRP. However, there are too few instructive models in teacher education that…

Literacy researchers often include young children in the research process. Yet discussions about the complexities of gaining and keeping assent are often missing in research reports. In this paper, we report on our attempts to make the assent process, a typical requirement for Institutional Review Boards, an educative experience for children in a…

This study was conducted to determine the effects of I Can Problem Solve Program (ICPS) on preschool children's perspective taking skills. Participants were 51 children who were attending two public preschool. In the study, pretest-posttest-retention test control group desing was used. There were an experimental group and two control groups in the…

Collaboration is an important aspect of social activity associated with young children's digital gameplay. Children organise their participation as they communicate with and support one another, through sharing knowledge and problem-solving strategies, displaying their expertise, encouraging others and creatively exploring possibilities for…

Oral language provides a foundation for reading comprehension. Story comprehension is a fundamental oral language skill; it covers making inferences, identifying main ideas, monitoring, perspective-taking, and applying working memory capacity. Complex reasoning and perspective-taking are key factors in deep reading comprehension. Preliterate…

This article includes findings from a mixed method survey at a large, public midwestern university following the election of Donald J. Trump as the president of the United States. It examines student perceptions about effective engagement in political discourse within social work classes. Survey questions urged students to suggest how instructors…

The account of the evolution of a classroom teacher (me) that follows is suggestive of a degree of agency and creativity that is rarely acknowledged. Teachers are currently positioned in ways that underline their instrumental role--their duty to students, parents, school and government to ensure that students achieve. A lack of faith in teachers'…

This study examined the play of 4-year-old children with a forest diorama that included toy representations of plants and animals. To examine the potential role of culture and expertise in diorama play, children from 3 samples participated: rural Native American, urban Native American, and urban non-Native American. Children's playtime was divided…

Decision-problem structuring is conceptualized to be a process comprising activities characterized by the students. The activities are cognitive efforts of a group coming to an understanding and determining the representation of the decision-problem and of what knowledge is relevant to the decision-problem. Cognitive effort refers to the fraction…

As a white assistant professor of mostly white graduate students who will become higher education leaders, I work to dismantle whiteness in my curriculum, assignments and pedagogy. I make meaning of my own white identity through my commitment to reflexivity as a constant activity. Equally salient are my identities as a queer, able-bodied,…

Metacognition is a required cognitive ability to achieve deep and meaningful learning that should be viewed from both an individual and social perspective. Recently, the transition from the earliest individualistic models to an acknowledgement of metacognition as socially situated and socially constructed has precipitated the study of…