This case study documents and interprets teachers' experiences in a professional development initiative called Changing Results for Young Readers in British Columbia. The reflections and discussions of a group of teachers in a rural school district were examined in order to understand how the participants constructed their realities relative to…

A restorative approach to conflict is being increasingly applied in schools around the world. Existing evaluation evidence has tended to focus on the impact on quantifiable outcomes such as number of behaviour incidents and rates of attendance and exclusion. This case study aimed to broaden the evidence base to capture a richer picture of the…

Educating children with disabilities alongside their peers in mainstream preschools has increased intensely over the past few years, affecting all aspects of early childhood education. Many children who previously would have been educated in segregated special centres are now being included in inclusive preschools. This research paper discusses…

This research describes and evaluates the application of a child-led approach to scientific enquiry (the Community of Scientific Enquiry, CoSE) to children aged 8-11 (Key Stage 2) in Northern Ireland. Primary teachers were introduced to CoSE at a workshop and asked to evaluate its implementation with their class. Results from children (n = 364)…

Through the GK-12 program of the National Science Foundation, graduate student fellows in a coastal marine and wetland studies program were trained to present targeted science concepts to middle- and high-school classes through their own research-based lessons. Initially, they were taught to follow the 5-E learning cycle in lesson plan…

Although discussions about inductive reasoning can be traced back thousands of years (Fitelson 2011), the implementation of the Standards for Mathematical Practice (SMP) within the Common Core State Standards (CCSSI 2010) is generating renewed attention to how students learn mathematics. The third SMP, "Construct viable arguments and critique…

In this paper we highlight findings from a teacher inquiry group study designed to explore possibilities for teaching contemporary Canadian literature to promote issues of social justice in secondary classrooms. Drawing on Boler and Zembylas's notion of a "pedagogy of discomfort," our paper will focus on the experiences of two teachers…

The assumption that inquiry-based instruction is more effective in influencing student science achievement than traditional didactic teaching has been the driving force of science education reform in recent decades and in many countries. However, the empirical relationship between these two kinds of science teaching and student science performance…

Treasure quests in virtual worlds can help students develop multi-literacy communication skills and promote community, offering insights about art teaching and learning. As part of the new media literacy, students explore the offerings of Second Life (SL), a virtual world, as a series of quests. Multi-literacy involves communication. Through their…

Although student involvement in research and inquiry can advance undergraduate learning, there are limited opportunities for undergraduate students to be directly involved in social science research. Social science faculty members typically work outside of laboratory settings, with the limited research assistance work being completed by graduate…

Evolutionary history and structural considerations constrain all aspects of animal physiology. Constraints on invertebrate locomotion are especially straightforward for students to observe and understand. In this exercise, students use spiders to investigate the concepts of adaptation, structure-function relationships, and trade-offs. Students…

Enactment of scientific inquiry in classroom has attracted a great attention of science educators around the world. In this study, we examined two competent teachers' (one Grade 9 chemistry teacher and one Grade 4 science teacher) enactment of scientific inquiry in selected teaching units to reveal the characteristics of enacted inquiry at…

This case study introduces the notion of an operative system to describe elementary teachers' knowledge and practice. Drawing from complex systems theory, the operative system is defined as the network of knowledge and practices that constituted teachers' work within a lesson study cycle. Data were gathered throughout a lesson study cycle in which…

Students (n = 1,069) from 60 4th-grade classrooms were taught the control of variables strategy (CVS) for designing experiments. Half of the classrooms were in schools that performed well on a state-mandated test of science achievement, and half were in schools that performed relatively poorly. Three teaching interventions were compared: an…

This paper presents a case study in which multi-age students (aged 6-12, N?=?32) in small groups made autonomous inquiries about the phenomenon of winter fishing within the framework of design-oriented pedagogy. The research analyzed storytelling videos that the students produced as learning objects. These videos revealed a picture of the…