Across three papers I study how differences in the quality and quantity of classroom instruction contribute to differences in what students learn in school. The first two papers focus on teachers--specifically what gives rise to differences between teachers in student learning. The third paper focuses on the quantity of instruction time students…

This paper reports the findings of a field experiment that gamified the classroom experience of elementary school ESL students by implementing digital badges-and-points which students could earn by achieving specific behavioral and learning goals. Altogether, 120 children in eight different classes participated in this study. Four of the classes…

This Statistics in Brief adds to existing research on early-career teachers by presenting findings on their preparation and supports from data from the 2011-12 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS). This brief, like past research, investigates several specific areas of preparation and types of support. For the purposes of this brief, early-career…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is the largest nationally representative and continuing assessment of what the nation's students know and can do in various subjects such as mathematics, reading, science, and writing, as well as civics, geography, U.S. history, and technology and engineering literacy. The results of NAEP are…

Novice learners are typically unfamiliar with abstract engineering symbols. They are also often unaccustomed to instructional materials consisting of a combination of text, diagrams, and equations. This raises the question of whether instruction on elementary electrical circuit analysis for novice learners should employ contextualized…

As digital technologies permeate every aspect of our lives, the complexity of the educational settings, and of the technological support we use within them, unceasingly rises. This increased complexity, along with the need for educational practitioners to apply such technologies within multi-constraint authentic settings, has given rise to the…

Because Laura Lukes used to be a geologist, when she started teaching science, she wanted to incorporate field experiences in her classroom. But, like many teachers, she faced obstacles: insufficient budgets, testing requirements, a lack of chaperones and transportation, and the safety concerns that come with fieldwork. As a result, a real field…

As a result of advances in technology and then the emergence of using Internet in every step of life, web that provides access to the documents such as picture, audio, animation and text in Internet started to be used. At first, web consists of only visual and text pages that couldn't enable to make user's interaction. However, it is seen that not…

This article describes a literature circle of seven pre-service teacher education students who read "Al Capone Shines My Shoes" (G. Choldenko, 2009). Students used the Internet to complete their roles, shared what they learned as they discussed the book, and then wrote about the digital experience. Four themes emerged from an analysis of…

This paper presents a small group computing environment in which four students each control a different point in a geometric space, such that as a group they collectively manipulate the vertices of a quadrilateral. Prior research has revealed that students have considerable difficulty in learning about the interrelationships among quadrilaterals…

The purpose of this research is to determine the digital propensities of post-secondary students (N=409) in various faculties/colleges at a large state university located in southwestern Turkey. It was also examined whether gender, the program attended, socioeconomic status, education type (first and second shift education), the number of family…

Although the concept of the sampling distribution is at the core of much of what we do in econometrics, it is a concept that is often difficult for students to grasp. The thought process behind bootstrapping provides a way for students to conceptualize the sampling distribution in a way that is intuitive and visual. However, teaching students to…

This study analyses the educational support offered through information and communication technology during formative assessment in two different cases in higher education. We analysed one blended and one virtual case from two different universities. The study aimed at identifying specific patterns of educational support intended to foster two…

Today's teachers are faced with a number of options when it comes to sharing knowledge about their professions. In the digital age, teachers use social media, online professional networks, email listservs, and blogging connections to share knowledge and resources. Here, I describe how one teacher engages with social media to develop networks that…

This article offers a critical reflection on the contemporary Open Educational Resource (OER) movement, its unquestioned investment in a collective "content fetish" and an educational "problem description" that focuses on issues of scarcity, access, and availability of quality materials. It also argues that OER proponents fail…