Though traditionally confined to the literature classroom, poetry is finding its way into courses of all disciplines in K-12 and higher education. Poetry and expressive writing are useful for encouraging critical thinking, serving as a way for students to synthesize course content, and building classroom rapport. It can also positively impact…

Globally, critical thinking skills have been acknowledged as an important goal of education and integrated STEM-based approaches have been reported to have the potential to enhance critical thinking. Therefore, this study examined integrated STEM instructional material for genetic learning to increase secondary school biology students' critical…

LaPiere's pioneering study explored the tenuous connection between attitudes and behaviors in the context of racism. This activity provides a replication proposal framework that is useful for applying critical thinking skills, including new forms of measurement. Students read the study and provide written responses to several discussion prompts…

This activity is designed to help students recognize ableist assumptions in rhetoric and how we evaluate what constitutes a "good" speaker and their ethos. It will highlight how ableism is embedded in social norms, using classroom public-speaking rubrics to do so. Students learn how to identify these ableist assumptions better and…

Around the world, musical engagement frequently involves movement. Most adults easily clap or sway to a wide range of tempos, even without formal musical training. The link between movement and music emerges early--young infants move more rhythmically to music than speech, but do not reliably align their movements to the beat. Laboratory work…

To combat environmental apathy, the authors seek to help students develop environmental knowledge, ethics, and "critical-thinking skills that will prepare them to evaluate issues and make informed decisions regarding stewardship of the planet". This article describes scientific, place-based investigations of local species and their…

Objective: The current study utilized a longitudinal person-centered approach (latent transition analysis [LTA]) to assess transitions into and out of risk-behavior profiles during the transition into and throughout the first year of college. Participants: Participants included 579 first-year college students (Mage = 18.13, SD = 0.94) from a large…

This article draws on the simple context of a two animal farm to create an engaging and mathematically meaningful problem solving task for students. It aims to encourage students to think systematically and to present their findings methodically. The task is structured sequentially, making it suitable for primary school students from Year 1 to…

Tangrams are a traditional Chinese puzzle comprising seven pieces that fit together to make a square. The seven pieces include two large right angled isosceles triangles, one medium size right angled isosceles triangle, two small right angled isosceles triangles, a small parallelogram, and a small square. The literature shows tangrams have been…

The purpose of this study was to examine the leisure and recreation opportunities available in community apartments for adults with intellectual disability (ID), and their association with leisure participation. The study included 38 adults with ID with moderate levels of impairment residing in 19 apartments. Apartment coordinators reported on…

Integrating the use of large datasets into our teaching provides critical and unique opportunities to build students' skills and conceptual knowledge. Here, we discuss the core components needed to develop effective activities based on large datasets, which align with the 5E learning cycle. Data-based activities should be structured around a…

Background/Context: There is much to understand about how parents and children interact around mathematics, particularly with families whose home language is different from the children's main language of schooling. Families of immigrant origin are likely to bring experiences and knowledge that may be different from what their children's schools…

Background: Fiber crafts occupy a vital position in technology innovation and present a promising space for computer science education, which continues to face lopsided participation. It remains unclear whether and how fiber crafts can become a context for computational learning and what role different materials play with the risk to miss…

Music education holds an ambiguous relationship to social justice and social change; it is both complicit in perpetuating relations of inequality and a potential force for positive change. There is a need to turn the ambiguity of music's social function--the simultaneous production of transformative and reproductive social processes--into the…

We introduce biology to the artist's design tool, the storyboard. This versatile organizing and visualizing artistic platform is introduced into the biology classroom to aid in an inventive and focused discovery process. Almost all biological concepts are dynamic, and storyboards offer biology, lecture, wet and computational labs, flexibility,…