A small community in southwest Michigan has been witness to a significant cultural divide within its school system. An influential church has permeated school leadership and in many cases has overstepped the proverbial "wall separating church and state." A fairly high-profile case saw the Sixth Circuit Court enjoin the district to remove…

We present an innovative course-based undergraduate research experience curriculum focused on the characterization of single point mutations in p53, a tumor suppressor gene that is mutated in more than 50% of human cancers. This course is required of all introductory biology students, so all biology majors engage in a research project as part of…

This study investigated the impact of discussion forum design and facilitative strategies on student participation and cognitive levels of student dialogue. A multiple-case study design was used. Three online classes taught by the same instructor participated (n = 55). Data were collected from observations, discussion transcripts, and teacher…

The paper examines the breadth and quality of formative assessment implementation of 202 mathematics and science teachers who participated in a two-year, school-based professional development programme that focused on formative assessment. Results are triangulated using three sources of data: baseline and end-of-Year 2 data from an annual survey,…

One of the outcomes of the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, "Te Whariki", is "working theories". Prior research on this concept has primarily utilised sociocultural theoretical underpinnings and neglected Piagetian constructivist theories. This paper explores ways the Piagetian concepts of equilibrium and disequilibrium…

Questioning and discussion techniques are effective instructional methods that develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. There is often inconsistent implementation of these techniques, which can result in a negative effect on student achievement. This case study explored elementary, middle, and high school teachers and evaluators'…

A wide variety of British universities are expanding efforts to attract international students. This article argues that higher education's implicit claim to all-inclusive "universality" may hereby be challenged by subsequent issues of cultural particularity. Here I set to conceptualise possible differences in the learning culture of…

Eyewitnesses instructed to close their eyes during retrieval recall more correct and fewer incorrect visual and auditory details. This study tested whether eye closure causes these effects through a reduction in environmental distraction. Sixty participants watched a staged event before verbally answering questions about it in the presence of…

One way of checking to what extent instructional textbooks achieve their aim is to evaluate the questions they contain. In this work, we analyze the questions that are included in the chapters on chemical bonding of ten general chemistry textbooks. We study separately the questions on intra- and on intermolecular bonding, with the former…

Instrumentation rigor and bias management are major challenges for qualitative researchers employing interviewing as a data generation method in their studies. A usual procedure for testing the quality of an interview protocol and for identifying potential researcher biases is the pilot study in which investigators try out their proposed methods…

The use of focus groups may provide researchers with important insights into research questions via participant discussion and interaction. As a human services practitioner and researcher, I became interested in learning how to conduct focus groups in order to apply these steps to my research and gain valuable insights about the human experience…

Being a competent communicator is complex and goes beyond expressing simple needs and wants to include having the ability to ask and respond to wh-questions. For individuals with autism spectrum disorders who use pictures to communicate, initiating communications such as questions can be difficult and it has been shown that some picture systems do…

In the last three columns, the authors introduced the idea of ethical reasoning, discussed its importance to education, and briefly dealt with a number of understandings essential to skilled ethical reasoning. In this column, the authors continue this discussion. They distinguish between simple and complex ethical questions and reason through an…

This article takes a look at the multiple purposes science informational books can serve in the classroom. The books featured are well written with creative visuals that engage readers in a variety of topics. Although any of these books can enhance the science topics it addresses in the book, they can also be great teaching tools for metacognitive…

People tend to think that streaks in random sequential events are rare and remarkable. When they actually encounter streaks, they tend to consider the underlying process as non-random. The present paper examines the time of pattern occurrences in sequences of Bernoulli trials, and shows that among all patterns of the same length, a streak is the…