Bransford, Brown, and Cocking (2000) note that students spend only 14% of their time in school but roughly 53% of their time in the home and community. The context of children's home and community life is largely untapped by schools, partially due to the logistics of organizing and capturing these experiences for study in the classroom. The use of…

Many teachers enter the profession through alternative certification programs, completing a master's degree at the same time as they start their teaching careers. This study explores the teaching and graduate experience of one of these teachers. In this collaborative inquiry, this teacher was both participant and co-researcher with two teacher…

The focus of this study was to investigate how parent involvement impacts student motivation in third grade special education. The study was conducted at Allen Elementary in Genoa, Ohio during the spring of 2011. After reviewing recent literature, it acknowledges the importance of parent participation on student academic education, the effects of…

An action research study was conducted at a campus college of a large Research I institution of higher education to explore transformative learning among higher education faculty as a result of participating in a blended program to prepare them to teach online. The purposeful sample included six full-time and one adjunct faculty, teaching a mix of…

Dynamic Assessment is a new theoretical framework for language assessment, and it is particularly relevant for underrepresented languages and learners. For this study the process is investigated in the context of Yugtun second language learners at a university level. This qualitative teacher action research was a study that involved seven…

Recent research (Te One, 2009) investigated perceptions of children's rights in a New Zealand early childhood care and education service (the Creche) for under-two-year-olds. Focus group interviews, interviews with teachers, observational field notes, photographs and a researcher's journal were used to generate data. Findings revealed that…

This article describes a collaborative research project that took place in two south-western US border towns and sought to understand how four "muslim" girls (age 14-17) expressed and negotiated their bodily learning experiences. Drawing on both the work of "arab-muslim" critical feminist Fatima Mernissi who utilized classical Islamic tools of…

The purpose of this study was to look at the influence of and interrelationships between concerns and socialization on the development of student physical education (PE) teachers' knowledge for teaching and their development as teachers. Six secondary student PE teachers completed a journal on a monthly basis throughout the course of a one-year…

Reading logs have become a practice in many elementary schools. Although lack of autonomy undermines intrinsic motivation (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973), no study has examined the effect of logs. Second and third-grade students (N = 112) were assigned either a mandatory or voluntary log and surveyed about their motivation to read at…

The daily observation of class sessions has enabled me to recognize that students possess a feeling of self-distrust in oral activities. For this reason, I designed a study carried out with a group of twelve eighth graders. This article illustrates an action research project conducted to enhance students' confidence when speaking on an online…

In this article, the author explores the idea that reading proficiency in a second language involves comprehending the second culture and using it to interpret the world view of the second language. Using cognitive theory, the author examined the relevance of prior knowledge of Chinese language and idioms to understanding text written in Chinese.…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the associations between teaching perspectives (TPs), faculty usage and perceptions of reflective journaling (RJ), and demographic characteristics among clinical faculty in nursing, social work, and counseling. A combination of causal-comparative and correlational designs was utilized, with stratified…

This mixed-methods study compared the outcomes of 5 general education teachers in a suburban, upper-middle-class elementary school engaged in transcript analysis during small-group reading strategies instruction to those obtained when engaged in audio analysis. Over a 5-month period, the teachers recorded one lesson per week and debriefed with the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the knowledge, skills, and dispositions enabled for elementary school participants in two summer herpetology programs, one in North Carolina and one in Florida. An additional purpose of this study was to examine the normative scientific practices in which participants engaged and to describe how these…

Despite years of efforts by dedicated volunteers, local organizations, and government agencies, poverty remains a persistent and problematic phenomenon within society. Indeed, U.S. Census data show a steady increase in the rate of poverty over the last several decades. The persistence in poverty has led to the development of federal programs…