Proponents of Michaelsen's Team-Based Learning (TBL) have claimed this teaching method quickly produces highly effective teams which are characterized by high trust among team members. Presumably, the high trust boosts performance because members feel less inhibited during discussions involving sharing personal views and challenging…

The purpose of this study was to simultaneously examine relationships between teacher quality and instructional time and mathematics and science achievement of 8th grade cohorts in 18 advanced and developing economies. In addition, the study examined changes in mathematics and science performance across the two groups of economies over time using…

The aims of this study were to 1) describe the children's physical activity (PA) patterns during the after-school period and 2) to compare the type and intensity of activity during the after-school period of children with or without participation in organized PA programmes. The participants were 456 children from four primary schools in Hong Kong.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate novices learning to use a mission planning system. Novice participants received one training session, followed by three test sessions. This was compared to expert performance. During the test sessions, all participants were required to "think aloud", based on Ericsson and Simon's (Ericsson, K.A. and…

The authors used a withdrawal design to evaluate the effects of a modified Color Wheel System (M-CWS) on the on-task behavior of 7 students enrolled in the 4th grade. Standard CWS procedures were modified to include a 4th set of rules designed to set behavioral expectation for cooperative learning activities. Mean data showed that immediately…

Here, we argue that action learning (AL) has been evolving into different variations, whose respective advocates appear to concentrate on one of the several components inherent in Revans' formulation of AL as L = P + Q. They do this--sometimes inappropriately--to the virtual or relative exclusion of other aspects, and this has consequences for the…

Based on a theoretical model developed by Schlechty, this case study focuses on a small high school, located on a college campus and designed to address the educational needs of gifted 9th- through 12th-grade students. Eight teachers who taught 9th- and 12th-grade classes and their 60 students were observed. Each teacher was observed during six…

High levels of physical inactivity are evident among many American children. To address this problem, providing physical activity (PA) during the school day within the CSPAP framework, is one strategy to increase children's PA. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a classroom-based PA program on children's PA. Two hundred…

The goal of the Intensive Partnership (IP) initiative is to improve student success by transforming how teachers are recruited, developed, assigned, rewarded, and retained. RAND and American Institutes for Research (AIR) have been studying the seven IP sites (including three districts and four charter management organizations--CMOs) since the…

The intention of this study was to determine how science instructors in the university laboratories spend time on instruction. The study, was guided by three research questions and two hypotheses tested at 0.05 level of significance. The study employed a non-participant observation case study design. 48 instructors teaching lower and higher levels…

The blended learning environment in university courses integrates teaching technologies in traditional (i.e. non-technological) learning contexts, most evidently through the adoption of a Learning Management System (LMS). Past studies on the use of LMSs have focused on the economic and technical challenges in LMS adoption (West et al., 2006;…

The paper explores important issues in today's education, not by analyses and statistics, but by projecting readers into the future and then asking them to look back on today's schools and to act like archaeologists--to surmise from all sorts of things they can observe, what was really important to us, what we really valued, how we treated kids,…

Student achievement is not progressing on mathematics as measured by state, national, and international assessments. Much of the research points to mathematics curriculum and instruction as the root cause of student failure to achieve at levels comparable to other nations. Since mathematics is regarded as a gate keeper to many educational…

A majority of today's higher education students have been nurtured on a steady diet of technology and Internet access, leading to the increased presence of laptops in higher education classrooms. However, many instructors are unsure whether or how to assimilate this technology into their lessons. The purpose of the following study was to examine…

This study extends teacher coaching with written performance feedback as a means to increase behavior-specific praise statements (BSPS) in inclusion classrooms at the high school level. Three inclusion math teachers increased their use of BSPS during mathematics instruction. On-task intervals and frequency of BSPS were measured throughout the…