Great science activities don't just happen; they are orchestrated by highly skilled teachers who are creative, caring, and innovative. Effective classroom teachers possess a deep understanding of the developmental characteristics of their students and are adept at translating this understanding into opportunities for individual students to…

Community assessment is the concept of using wider professional communities to provide authentic assessment to students. It means using the knowledge available in one's immediate surroundings and through Web 2.0 tools to enrich instructional processes. It means using retirees, experts, and volunteers from professional organizations and…

In the spring of 2012 students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Education received national attention when they refused to participate in the field test of a teacher performance assessment being run by Pearson Incorporated and Stanford University. Students, led by their professor, demanded they be given informed consent about…

Experts have advocated anonymous grading as a means of eliminating actual or perceived evaluator bias in subjective student assessment. The utility of anonymity in assessment rests on whether information derived from student identity can unduly influence evaluation. The halo effect provides a conceptual background for why a bias might occur. In…

This action research study was conducted in an elementary school with a team of seven fourth- grade teachers. Transcripts of the fourth-grade teachers' discussions during their common planning sessions were recorded and analyzed. The data revealed that during collaborative planning sessions the teachers repeatedly referred to authentic…

The purpose of this study is to exam in-depth, the Comprehensive, Powerful, Academic Database (CPAD), a data decision-making tool that determines and identifies students at-risk of dropping out of school, and how the CPAD assists administrators and teachers at an elementary campus to monitor progress, curriculum, and performance to improve student…

Research supports the importance of teacher quality on effective student learning. School districts recognize this fact and focus extensively on hiring quality teachers and improving teaching skills through professional development programs. Amazingly, despite common sense and a vast amount of research that reflects that employee performance is a…

The instrumental case study reported here adds to the literature on authentic assessment by illuminating how one secondary agricultural education instructor employed authentic assessment in the agricultural mechanics laboratory. The study was underpinned by the constructivist notion of authentic learning and assessment, or allowing students to…

This article offers a critical examination of one regional institution's endeavor to imagine, develop, and implement a sustainable campus-wide writing-intensive program. Grounded in local and institutional contexts, our narrative elucidates how WPAs at rural and regional institutions can reconcile the processes of negotiation and concession to…

Peer educators can be a powerful addition to classroom learning environments. Traditionally, the university science teaching model relies on graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) to provide instruction in laboratory class sessions, but there is increasing evidence that undergraduate TAs (UTAs) can fill an equivalent role. A comparison of student…

Collaborative learning has become a dominant learning apparatus for higher level learning objectives. Much of the psychological and social mechanisms operating under this complex group activity, however, is not yet well understood. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of college students' communication competence and degree…

Without a doubt, the movement toward corporatized, standardized, and even sanitized education models in K-12 education impacts the way students at the higher education level view teaching and learning. New York City public school teachers have been trained to focus entirely on measurable outcomes. Writing is taught as a well-structured paragraph…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how the completion of a peer-teaching course impacted pre-service teachers ability to perform, teach, and assess motor skills. Central Michigan University (CMU) implemented a required course for physical education teacher education majors in which enrollees were evaluated on how well they performed…

This study aimed to gain knowledge of students' beliefs and difficulties in understanding p-values, and to use this knowledge to develop improved teaching programs. This study took place over four consecutive teaching semesters of a one-semester tertiary statistics unit. The study was cyclical, in that the results of each semester were used to…

Background: In 2006, Oslin and Mitchell published a review of the game-centred approaches (GCAs) to teaching and coaching literature highlighting a number of core concepts thought to provide justification for the use of GCAs including (a) its potential to enhance participant motivation, (b) potential for tactical transfer, and (c) development of…