This report summarizes the Austin Independent School District bilingual and English as a second language programs students' academic performance during 2017-2018. Students' advanced placement course performance, state academic tests (STAAR and EOC) performance, and graduation and dropout rates are summarized. [For the Executive Summary, see…

This paper takes a multimodal approach to analysing embodied interaction and discourses of scientific investigation using an interactive tangible tabletop. It argues that embodied forms of interaction are central to science inquiry. More specifically, the paper examines the role of hand actions in the development of descriptions and explanations…

While there have been very limited studies of the educational computing literature to analyze the research trends since the early emergence of educational computing technologies, the authors argue that it is important for both researchers and educators to understand the major, historical educational computing trends in order to inform…

Students' informal conversations on social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook) shed light into their educational experiences--opinions, feelings, and concerns about the learning process. Data from such uninstrumented environments can provide valuable knowledge to inform student learning. Analyzing such data, however, can be challenging. The complexity…

Phase 1 of this study explores findings from a nationwide survey on computer-assisted language learning (CALL) that was completed by 409 in-service teachers of French, German, and Spanish. These results, in turn, informed specific themes that were explored in greater detail during focus group sessions with 22 in-service K--2 foreign language…

Background: A "learner identity" can be broadly defined as how an individual feels about himself/herself as a learner and the extent to which he/she describes himself/herself as a "learner." The literature suggests that those from non-traditional backgrounds may struggle to adapt to a university environment with all its related…

This paper discusses Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) as a method for the assessment of prior learning. The Accreditation of Prior Learning (APL) is a procedure to offer learners an individualized curriculum based on their prior experiences and knowledge. The placement decisions in this process are based on the analysis of student material by domain…

To become successful communicators, children must be sensitive to the clarity/ambiguity of language. Significant gains in children's ability to detect communicative ambiguity occur during the early school-age years. However, little is known about the cognitive abilities that support this development. Relations between cognitive flexibility and…

Universities all over the world are undergoing change to improve teaching, learning and service. These changes have been motivated by call for universities to connect more to communities to address their problems. One of the means of ensuring that universities and communities engage mutually in a partnership where students, faculty and community…

Background: Over the past decade, administrators have implemented school-based mentoring (SBM) programs in schools across several western countries. However, few studies have compared the views of mentors and parents regarding the factors that determine SBM success. Objectives: The purpose of this work is to explore the factors that may facilitate…

Developing exercises that lead students to use higher order thinking skills is a challenge for faculty in any discipline. An excellent way to approach this problem is to use the Revised Bloom's Taxonomy as a guide. In the taxonomy, the highest level of learning is to create. The author describes an assignment that builds on the use of…

The purpose of this study was to understand how students utilized multiple representations to learn and explain science concepts, in this case the human breathing mechanism. The study was conducted with Grade 11 students in a human biology class. Semistructured interviews and a two-tier diagnostic test were administered to evaluate students'…

The research reported here was focussed on accessing the perceptions of pre-service teachers regarding the critical factors which support highly effective learning in schools in the United Kingdom. Their perceptions were arranged into a taxonomy so that they can be used as a starting point for their reflections on the observations they make of…

The purpose of this study was to examine kindergarten teachers' and children's perceptions of their relationships following a person-centred approach, and to describe patterns of relationships between them. 67 Kindergarten teachers and 403 children completed two measures designed to explore their perceptions of their relations. Four patterns of…

Determining which dimensions of social classification are culturally significant is a developmental challenge. Some suggest this is accomplished by differentially privileging intrinsic visual cues over nonintrinsic cues (Atran, 1990; Gil-White, 2001), whereas others point to the role of noun labels as more general promoters of kind-based reasoning…