This investigation examined how out-of-class support (OCS) affects student satisfaction and motivation to learn. Students (N =594) were randomly assigned to experimental conditions manipulating a highly supportive, moderately supportive, or nonsupportive teacher following a hypothetically stressful situation. Significant and meaningful main…

Classrooms are dynamic environments in which teachers and students engage in ongoing reciprocal interactions throughout the school day. Classes that include classwide effective intervention practices are likely to have positive teacher-student interactions and to promote student learning and engagement while minimizing problem behaviors. However,…

This report describes a high school mathematics teacher's decisions about classroom organization and interactions during his first two years using a new curriculum intended to support teachers' development of student-centered, contributive classroom discourse. In year one, the teacher conducted class and interacted with students primarily in small…

The author maintains that present-day civilization can exist and develop only as a unity of nature, culture, and society; that a new ecological worldview must be developed to teach citizens to have a cultivated and expanded ecological awareness that is characterized by a number of fundamental features: (1) Motivation (the moral stance of the…

The essence of my argument is that Practitioner Research can be pursued not only by observing whole classes, but also by observing what happens when a teacher talks to a student outside of the classroom setting. What this setting offers to practitioner-researchers is a unique opportunity to understand what both the teacher and the student do to…

As mathematics teachers attempt to promote classroom discourse that emphasizes reasoning about mathematical concepts and supports students' development of mathematical autonomy, not all students will participate similarly. For the purposes of this research report, I examined how 15 seventh-grade students participated during whole-class discussions…

We compared the structure of discussions in a middle school mathematics classroom before (Year 1) and after (Year 2) teacher participation in professional development activities aimed at enhancing students' participation and the co-construction of mathematical ideas. Changes in the role of teacher and student were accompanied by identifiable…

In this study, I explore the experiences of five Japanese returnees ("kikokushijo"). The participants recorded taped monologues or wrote narratives reflecting on their time spent living abroad and of returning to Japan. These retrospective life stories revealed four prominent themes of conflict: group orientation; bullying and…

Background/Context: In an age of test-driven accountability, many schools are returning to banking pedagogies in which students passively take in content. Inquiry-based instruction offers one approach for actively involving students in meaningful learning activity, however, research on inquiry pedagogies often focuses on academic accomplishments.…

The use of discourse in the mathematics classroom can be difficult to implement and manage. The same students participate in every discussion while others contribute only when called on, and even then their contributions are sparse. Some students make comments that relate to procedure but never reach the deeper-level mathematical concepts. This…

The difficulty of using insights from educational research and scholarship to inform the design of subject teaching is widely acknowledged. In this article, we present an example of the design of a short science teaching intervention to illustrate one approach to using insights from research to inform the design of teaching. After outlining the…

This work is based on the assumption that if the classroom is a space in which manifestations of critical autonomous thinking appear systematically, then it promotes that same kind of thinking by the students, in other contexts. But what count as manifestations of critical autonomous thinking, and how can we observe them? As Robert Young's…

There is an ever-increasing trend in the world today to adopt English as the language of instruction in higher education. The increase is in part due to the views that such adoption constitutes the key to competitiveness in a globalized higher education market. Thus, a growing number of universities in non-English-speaking countries switch to…

Studies on classroom practices in Africa and the developing world tend to report on the visible general features, i.e. code switching, rote learning, memorisation and safe talk, with very little on the micro, invisible, classroom life. This article, based on the findings of a study involving classroom observations of teachers and pupils'…

Constructing scientific explanations and participating in argumentative discourse are seen as essential practices of scientific inquiry (e.g., R. Driver, P. Newton, & J. Osborne, 2000). In this paper, we identify three goals of engaging in these related scientific practices: (1) sensemaking, (2) articulating, and (3) persuading. We propose using…