The purpose of this qualitative study is to explore students' self-reported growth of mathematical understanding resulting from writing about the historical development of a mathematical concept. Using excerpts from undergraduate students' written reflections about their experiences with the task of writing about mathematics, this study describes…

This article explores the need to locate individuals' personal life stories in their life histories when the narrative approach to studying different aspects of teachers is used. This is partly done by revealing the limitations of the narrow focus on personal stories in research on teachers when it is restricted to researching teachers' personal…

Teacher preparation is a hot topic in the world of education today. Performance assessments mark one way that colleges may prove the readiness of their pre-service teaching candidates for a career in the classroom. This study used methods to evaluate one college's effort to implement such an assessment, to integrate assessment tasks into its…

PISA is a large international educational assessment activity coordinated by the "Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development" (OECD). PISA's "Functional Literacy" emphasizes the theoretical concept of mathematics as a human activity. From this pedagogical point of view, PISA's "mathematization cycle"…

Counseling families in poverty can be a daunting process if one only focuses on what is lacking. Taking such a deficit approach is limiting not only to the counselor but also can serve to disempower the clients. This paper presents a strengths-based approach for counseling families living in poverty that emphasizes relational processes and the…

The use of autoethnography in social science research is becoming increasingly popular. The potential this research approach might offer to the theory and practice of outdoor education has yet to be fully examined. In this paper, autoethnography is used to explore some personal accounts of my own outdoor experiences from which I derive distinctive…

This article presents the findings of a linguistic ethnographic pilot study, conducted as part of an ongoing research study, to examine how students utilise their knowledge and experience in understanding literary texts being studied from different cultural and temporal spaces. The analysis of this development in the students' comprehension of new…

The paper explores the opportunities and challenges of combining media literacy and social-emotional literacy to promote mental health and well-being in school curricula. It describes the implementation of an experimental module within the program "Crescere insieme What's Up" (Growing up together What's Up). This upstream prevention and…

The recent emphasis on engineering practices provides an opportunity for K-12 science and mathematics teachers to apply STEM concepts to real-world engineering design challenges (EDCs) for students (Next Generation Science Standards, 2013). We argue that engineering practices are more equitable when they are relatable to students and rooted in…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to propose a framework for the types of practices and ideologies that the most successful clinical-based, early childhood teacher education programs use to prepare their preservice teachers for the profession. Grounded theory methods guided the collection and analysis of data. Participants included…

Twenty-five years at the helm of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) have left the author with vivid memories: of knocks and bruises, peaks of exhilaration and, especially, unforgettable characters. But as for lessons learned, that's a very different story. In this article, the author shares some of the successes that happened in NAS for…

Measuring the refractive index "n" of a substance or medium is part of every introductory physics course. Various approaches to determine this index have been developed over the years based on the different ways light reflects and transmits in the medium. In this paper, the authors would like to present a simple geometrical derivation of the…

This commentary describes a two-week domestic travel study course for undergraduate sociology students designed to introduce students to the practice of social research and to the larger discipline of sociology. We arranged activities, presentations, and experiences in Chicago and Washington, DC. In this article, we outline the relevant parts of…

A mixed-method exploratory approach was employed to examine the relationship between epistemological beliefs and quality of thinking when participants first thought about an ill-structured problem alone, and then with another person in a dyad. The results showed that there was not a systematic connection between epistemological beliefs and…

A reflection is offered on what certain scholars call the variousness of students and teachers of the sort that psychologists often miss. A case is made for the need to separate one's self from the objects one studies as one attempts to assess students and modes of learning, the variations in historical eras and their influence on the shaping of…