Science education reform requires innovative professional development initiatives. Here we report the success of an interdisciplinary learning circle that met regularly over the course of a year to explore pedagogical theory and develop action research projects with the goal of improving critical-thinking skills in math and science undergraduates.…

Participants' performances of outdoor skills and leadership are interpreted for environmental learning using Ingold's (2000) notion of an "education of attention": the fine-tuning of their perception. The actual tasks and activities of adventure travel have until recently gone largely unquestioned; but the relationship between skills and…

The purpose of this paper was to report on the findings of a study examining students' online interaction patterns. The context of the study was a graduate online class delivered via Blackboard[R]. The primary data for the study came from students' discussion board postings, online learning journals, and course grades. Various data analysis…

Although protocol analysis can be an important tool for researchers to investigate the process of collaboration and communication, the use of this method of analysis can be time consuming. Hence, an automatic coding procedure for coding dialogue acts was developed. This procedure helps to determine the communicative function of messages in online…

The author describes her two-year experience of living in China and how this molded her attitudes about English language learners in Texas. Examples drawn from the Nanjing International School show how one school worked to meet the needs of a diverse group of students, with more than 70% learning English as a second language. The practical…

This article examines the interactional work in which two groups of secondary ESL students engaged to achieve and sustain participation in group oral assessment, which is designed to assess a student's interactive communication skills in a school-based assessment context. The in-depth observation of the ways in which participants co-constructed…

One Master's Program, Initiatives in Educational Transformation, has integrated a computer management system (WebCT) into a learner-centered (Weimer, 2002) community of K-12 practicing teachers. Online discussions were an extension of instructional practices that supported dialogue, reflection, and self-assessment for the purpose of continuous…

This is a must-have resource for educators committed to meeting the needs of their struggling students in Grades 3-6. Teachers get a whole toolbox filled with research-based, easy to implement RTI interventions that really work! Get strategies in five core areas--plus correlations to the Common Core State Standards and effective scaffolding tips…

In the current testing environment, high school reading teachers may often rely on a multiple-choice assessment as the best practice. This study suggests that a visual arts assessment of reading comprehension can rigorously measure critical thinking. This action research study follows 21 high school juniors through the selection, creation, and…

While a body of research exists on individual metacognition, research on reflective communities is just beginning. This study generated a framework for conceptualizing metacognition in groups by describing likely components of group metacognition. I focused on a group of five preservice science teachers engaged in problem-based learning (PBL). The…

English educators at all levels have endeavored to understand difference in their classrooms both in terms of the content that they teach and in terms of the social and cultural identities of students in their classrooms. However, although educators have come a long way in understanding identity as it is constituted by race and gender, much work…

This article describes an undergraduate Participatory Action Research (PAR) course in which students with and without intellectual disabilities collaborated as co-researchers in order to explore various aspects of the university experience. The article describes the university course as well as presents results of the students' PAR projects. The…

This paper reports on a longitudinal study of nine teachers and their principal in a new secondary school that met to select, read, discuss and determine the viability of the text for their growing English classes and the library. This research offered a unique opportunity to examine how practitioners create and develop a social context for…

This study pursues a Habermasian analysis of citizen discussions and of the local public sphere to shed light on renewable energy futures in rural east-central Canada. Using data from group discussions, it pursues an investigation of utterances, validity claims and of discourses. The analysis is supplemented by participant observation of publicly…

This report presents how the learning technologies Discussion Board and PaperShow are incorporated into postgraduate translation modules by means of observing their impact on students' learning. Initially and mainly for administrative reasons as well as being encouraged to make use of the university's virtual learning environment (VLE), I set up…