Validity is a central principle of assessment relating to the appropriateness of the uses and interpretations of test results. Usually, one of the inferences that we wish to make is that the score reflects the extent of a student's learning in a given domain. Thus, it is important to establish that the assessment tasks elicit performances that…

This lesson plan is based on "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins. Characters in "The Hunger Games" form alliances both inside and outside the arena. Katniss and Gale form alliances within District 12. Katniss, Peeta, and the other tributes form alliances for a variety of reasons during the Games. An alliance means that "someone's got your back"…

Last year, beginning on New Year's Day, as president of the National Council for Geographic Education (NCGE), the author wrote one tweet every day beginning with "What is Geography? 1 of 365" and posted them to his Twitter page. His goals in the series were several. He sought to point out as organization president how the NCGE serves the geography…

We investigated the hypothesis that interdisciplinarity is being explicitly taught behind the facade of traditional disciplines. We interviewed 14 academics (seven geographers and seven agricultural scientists) about their teaching in the inherently interdisciplinary field of natural resource management. Our teachers were generally well informed…

In this article, we focus on narrative practices in adult education in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium), and reflect on a current project in a multicultural neighbourhood that is socially and economically marked by poverty and where turbulence and conflict are rife amongst local inhabitants. While adult education aims to energize the…

Following her displacement from her native land as a result of the Arab Israeli war in 1967, a Palestinian child relocated to a new home as a refugee. As people find meaning in their environments they chose to live in, and build their identity through engaging in meaningful occupations, such forced displacement left her with many challenges, and…

The study presented in this paper focuses on young people's languaging, or ways-with-being-with-words, including literacies, in everyday practices that stretch across formal and informal learning spaces. Taking sociocultural and ethnographic points of departure, the aim of the study is to investigate aspects of young people's situated and…

To contribute effectively to academic discourse on urban sustainability, disciplines need to think outside their silos and work together more collaboratively. Although straightforward to posit in theory, the practical realities of bringing together people with different worldviews, languages and skills can be frustrating and lead to loss of…

Geocaching is an inquiry-based activity encouraging creativity, active learning, and real-world problem solving. As such, it is an educational opportunity for students in all grade levels. Educators benefit by observing students using higher-order thinking instead of rote learning offered by using traditional worksheets, tests, or quizzes. Also,…

A problem that history teachers in the United States face is that they lack an appropriate reference point from which to address many of today's global issues. The source of this problem is an antiquated model of society, still taught in the universities, that largely reflects the society that existed a century ago. For the last decade, the author…

Americans thrive on competition. But American schools have been suspicious of competition for generations, and are generally horrified by the idea that success should be accompanied by a reward like a title, a trophy, or a cash prize. In this article, the author stresses that the self-esteem movement in the 1990s made many educators squeamish…

Glaciers serve as early indicators of climate change. Over the last 35 years, our research team has recovered ice-core records of climatic and environmental variations from the polar regions and from low-latitude high-elevation ice fields from 16 countries. The ongoing widespread melting of high-elevation glaciers and ice caps, particularly in low…

The purpose of this study is to determine the place of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in teaching geography, the general level of secondary school students' attitudes towards Geography Information Systems and whether this changes according to different variables. The population of the research consists of the students studying in Istanbul,…

The current study explores teachers' perceptions of Esri Story Maps as effective teaching tools. Story Maps are a relatively new web application created using Esri's cloud-based GIS platform, ArcGIS Online. They combine digitized, dynamic web maps with other story elements to help the creator effectively convey a message. The relative ease…

This paper describes an approach for supporting inquiry learning from source materials, realised and tested through a tool-kit. The approach is optimised for tasks that require a student to make interpretations across sets of resources, where opinions and justifications may be hard to articulate. We adopt a dialogue-based approach to learning…