The question of content -- that is, knowledge in the curriculum -- has all but disappeared from global policy and academic discourses concerning teaching and teachers. Invoking the work of Michael Young and his colleagues concerning 'bringing knowledge back in', Bildung-centred Didaktik, and Joseph J. Schwab's curriculum thinking, this article…

Understanding the nature of science (NOS) has long been a desired outcome of science education, despite ongoing disagreements about the content, structure, and focus of NOS expectations. Addressing the concern that teachers likely focus only on student learning expectations appearing in standards documents, this study examines the current state of…

The World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe (WHO EURO) and the German Federal Centre for Health Education (BZgA) published the Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe in 2010. The standards were developed to provide an overview of those sexuality education issues that should be addressed in school at various specific age levels.…

Knowledge of prerequisite dependencies is crucial to several aspects of learning, from the organization of learning content to the selection of personalized remediation or enrichment for each learner. As the amount of content is scaled up, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to manually specify all of the prerequisites among the different…

Building on the work of Schmidt et al., we propose a definition of curricular coherence for K-12 mathematics that encompasses both the arrangement of topics, which we call coherence of content, and the habits of mind the curriculum fosters in students, which we call coherence of practice. We give examples to illustrate each. [For the complete…

The term "constructivism" is used very widely and somewhat loosely in education. In this article I aim to clarify the term, which can be used in relation to two quite different theories: one related to "how" we learn and the other related to "what" we learn. Being clear about the origins of the two uses can help…

Creativity brings joy, wonder, efficiency, excitement, and pleasure into our lives. Although creativity can also be malevolent (see, e.g., Cropley et al., Creat Res J 20(2):105-115, 2008), for the most part creativity makes life better, and most of us would like to have and to experience more of it. Nurturing creativity is therefore something that…

As technological advancements continue to revolutionise the realm of education, use of technology in both K-12 and university classrooms paves the way for making flipped classroom a trending pedagogical model. Flipping a course simply means reversing a traditional model of in-class lecture followed by practice and homework. Research has shown that…

One purpose of classroom discussions is not to try to change people's views but to better understand why classmates believe whatever they believe. One of the best ways to achieve such deeper understanding is to hear the basis for other people's beliefs. In this light, the author modeled this behavior for students, which required revealing personal…

The culture wars concerning what history should be taught in U.S. schools are often played out through the release of new state or national history/social studies standards or the textbooks aligned with those standards. Despite their oft-politicized status, every state now has history standards. However, these standards take on different forms in…

This article examines four years of assessed results and student satisfaction for a postgraduate course offered in a "flipped" or "inverted" mode during a four-year period in Hong Kong. Although final examination results rose in the first year and remained high, student satisfaction dropped in the first year and remained low.…

The Mineralogy Concept Inventory (MCI) is a statistically validated 18-question assessment that can be used to measure learning gains in introductory mineralogy courses. Development of the MCI was an iterative process involving expert consultation, student interviews, assessment deployment, and statistical analysis. Experts at the two universities…

A global shortage of qualified physics teachers requires some teachers to teach physics out-of-field (OOF). A concern for OOF physics teaching is that without appropriate physics content knowledge (CK), these teachers tend to focus on rote learning and may find it difficult to support students who require additional assistance or extension; they…

The aim of the study was to compare the effect of a Sport Education-based irregular teaching unit on the high-school students' physical activity (PA) during school recess. A sample of 91 adolescents (45 girls) aged 13-16 years old met the exclusion criteria. The six classes were cluster-randomly assigned to the Irregular Sport Education group…

Determined to do justice to the complexity of the seventeenth century, as a messy but crucial period in British history, and to develop their pupils' disciplinary understanding of how and why interpretations of the past are constructed, Dan Keates and his department set out to exploit the rich seam of interpretations of Cromwell. The quest to…