In this study, we investigated students' thinking about the use of letters in algebra. Responses from over 1,400 Australian secondary school students to a set of three algebra items were analysed to determine the prevalence of the "letter as object" misconception. We estimate that 50% to 80% of Year 7 students bring this misconception to…

What happens when forces attempting to privatize education create and produce a Hollywood film with an education reform plot line? This essay explores "Won't Back Down" through cultural studies and progressive education lenses in an effort to unveil misrepresentations of education and education reform. Drawing on scholarship in these…

Is it a good thing to have a lot of evidence? Surely the historian would answer that yes, it is: the more evidence that can be used, the better. The problem with this approach, though, is that too much data can be overwhelming for the history student--and, in Ian Phillips's experience, for the history student teacher. In this article Phillips…

The acquisition of number conservation is a critical step in children's numerical and mathematical development. Classic developmental studies have established that children's number conservation is often biased by misleading intuitions. However, the precise nature of these conservation errors is not clear. A key question is whether conservation…

In this article, Amy Shuffelton addresses school shootings through an investigation of honor and masculinity. Drawing on recent scholarship on honor, including Bernard Williams's "Shame and Necessity" and Kwame Anthony Appiah's "The Honor Code," Shuffelton points out that honor has been misconstrued as exclusively a matter of…

In this reply to Elon Langbeheim's response to an article recently published in this journal, authors Smith and Villarreal identify several types of general chemistry students' misconceptions concerning the concept of particle position during physical change. They focus their response on one of the misconceptions identified as such: Given a solid…

The article illustrates our long term experience in teaching statistics for non-statisticians, especially for students of economics and humanities. The article is focused on some problems of the basic course that can weaken the interest in statistics or lead to false use of statistic methods.

Many so-called brain-based educational approaches have been strongly criticized for their lack of empirical support and occasionally for their use of pseudoscientific concepts. As a result, several use the term neuromyths to refer to false beliefs or misinterpretations regarding neuroscientific facts. We surveyed both teachers and student teachers…

The image of the student with ADHD as Dennis the Menace is an outdated stereotype. Some students with ADHD are restless and disruptive, notes the author, but many others who suffer from this disorder are quieter, more distracted and more passive, and not productive or consistent in their work. Thomas E. Brown, a well-known expert on ADHD, shares a…

This article draws on a larger research project that questions the impacts of '21st century learning' on teachers and leaders. Implicit is an evaluation of the promise of futures pedagogies to deepen teacher reflective practice. Critical theoretic and critical hermeneutic approaches underpin this research. It therefore analyses policy and…

The ability to explain scientific phenomena is a key feature of scientific literacy, and engaging students' prior knowledge, especially their alternate conceptions, is an effective strategy for enhancing scientific literacy and developing expertise. The gap in knowledge about the alternate conceptions that novices have about many of Earth's…

A version of this article, "Blacks in Research? How Shall We Be Portrayed?", was delivered by the author as the 2013 W. E. B. Du Bois Distinguished Lecture to the annual conference of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Blacks in Education Special Interest Group (Black SIG). This article examines the portrayal of Blacks…

In this article, Erica Edwards and Jennifer Esposito review the fourth season of "Love and Hip Hop New York," which is just a small part of the larger "Love and Hip Hop" reality TV series, which characterizes love through narrow representations of race, gender, and sexuality. Their analysis reports that this television program…

In this article, the authors examine how bullying is portrayed in three recent young adult novels, focusing specifically on whether the information about bullying is accurate, biased, or represents old myths in comparison to current research. The authors conduct a systematic analysis of the following four themes: (1) What is bullying?; (2) Who are…

This case study describes the campus context and process for successfully including community engagement language into promotion and tenure policies at Virginia Commonwealth University, a high research, urban public university. The paper also describes barriers our campus faced during the promotion and tenure policy revision process, especially…