The researcher explored empowerment, sustainability, and leadership pertaining to Texas' District of Innovation designations. House Bill 1842, passed by the Texas Legislature in 2015, allowed qualifying districts to exempt certain sections of the Texas Education Code. The aim of these exemptions was to decentralize governance in order to…

Despite the widespread availability and frequency of use of technological tools in the classrooms, there is little empirical research on examining the teaching practices and how teachers use technology to support scientific inquiry. This multi-case study examined the teaching practices of two science teachers and how they used the technology to…

Starting with early research on multiple source comprehension that primarily emerged from work in history, researchers have explored several types of instructional manipulations including altering the features of the inquiry task that is given (such as being asked to write a narrative or an argument); changing features of the task environment…

The most challenging parts of teaching mathematics are engaging students and helping them understand the connections between mathematics concepts. In this volume, you'll find a collection of low floor, high ceiling tasks that will help you do just that, by looking at the big ideas at the third-grade level through visualization, play, and…

Current political and social climates have pushed conversations about equity and inclusion to the forefront. At the same time, lawmakers in more than half of US states are pushing legislation that would limit discussion of these issues in schools. Educators must consider the best ways to continue conversations of equity and inclusion without…

We describe a long-standing weeklong K-12 STEM teacher workshop that shifted to a virtual platform in 2020. We re-engaged former participants during this STEM Institute with goals of (1) modeling ways to connect best practices for STEM education gained in previous workshops to a virtual environment, (2) providing space for teacher reflection on…

Located in Napa, California, the Oxbow School is a 1-semester boarding program for visual arts, critical inquiry, self-discovery, and community. Oxbow's pandemic story concentrates on a series of assignments designed to help students cope with the transition to emergency online instruction amid isolation and uncertainty. The images illustrating…

The transformative agenda of sustainability education constitutes the focus of early-years education. In quality sustainability educational projects, children are supported to draw links between nature and society and relate to the studied phenomena. Is this methodological approach realized in educational programs for the early years? The present…

Contemporary research suggests an urgent need for educators to improve the quality of STEM teaching and learning. We developed a semester-long model curriculum for STEM teaching and learning. The overarching goal of this study was to establish an authentic inquiry approach to advanced laboratory courses that is interdisciplinary, collaborative,…

This article describes a new competence-oriented teaching rationale for a science course, developed in Germany through close cooperation between teachers and researchers, that seeks to improve scientific literacy at upper-level secondary school (ages 15-17). Its aim is to help students become independent and competent experimenters by combining…

Australian students' perception of a trial Religious Education (RE) programme is the focus of this paper. Students (N = 1478) from 37 schools, primary and secondary, completed an online survey that included six Likert style items that aligned with six RE development principles that guided the development of the trial. Curriculum development was…

Recent studies in science education have recognized a possible link between teachers' beliefs about scientific knowledge and its practice in the classroom. Therefore, it is essential to promote the evolution of the pre-service teachers' initial beliefs about methodologies for the teaching of chemistry in accordance with the discipline foundations…

In this article, we discuss tensions that emerged as we collaborated with teachers to iteratively design and refine an afterschool reading intervention approach that emphasizes inquiry and disciplinary learning for upper elementary readers positioned as struggling in school. Our findings are organized around four design tensions that help us…

This paper describes the application of a "biosocial" approach to informal health and science education. As an engagement between biological and critical social sciences, biosocial theory has sought to re-articulate human bodies as fundamentally the product of interrelationships between the biological and social dimensions of human life.…

The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of authentically based instruction using the 5E model as the structure for lesson delivery on student emotions and the extent to which the students perceived that the teacher was facilitating mastery goals. Participants were 241 sophomore and junior biology students in three urban high schools in…