Chartered in 1994 and opened in 1996, the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School (CCLCS) was among the first charter schools in Massachusetts. CCLCS strives to foster "intellectual development, academic achievement, project based learning, interdisciplinary studies, community partnerships, environmental studies, global awareness, and an ethical…

A two-year evaluation of the Advancing Young Adult Learning (AYAL) project was conducted. AYAL is a professional development process for teachers working with 16- to 24-year-old students preparing for their General Educational Development Test (GED). It combines Youth Cultural Competency (YCC), Project-Based Learning (PBL), and strengths-based…

This article describes a detailed analysis of knowledge building in a problem-based learning group. Knowledge building involves increasing the collective knowledge of a group through social discourse. For knowledge building to occur in the classroom, the teacher needs to create opportunities for constructive discourse in order to support student…

Educational technology is seldom used to facilitate more active student learning in the classroom. Instructors who have mastered PowerPoint, however, could just as easily learn to create simple pieces of interactive multimedia that encourage student participation in learning tasks and that appeal to multiple intelligences and learning styles.…

Learning about local government seems boring and irrelevant to most young people, particularly to students from high-poverty backgrounds. The authors explore a promising approach for solving this problem, Storypath, which engages students in authentic learning and active citizenship. The Storypath approach is based on a narrative in which students…

The purpose of this exploratory case study was to identify, investigate, and describe factors that contributed to the academic success of Phelps High School, a rural, isolated, Appalachian high school in Pike County Kentucky. The academic index of the school in 2000 was 48% and in a six year period the academic index of the school improved to 94%.…

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID)-funded Early Grade Reading Assessment (EGRA) program is an oral assessment designed to measure the most basic foundation skills for literacy acquisition in the early grades. EGRA's purpose is to document student performance on early grade reading skills in order to inform ministries…

Student teachers learned about teaching principles with the help of an instructional program that included classroom animation exemplars, where expert teachers demonstrate how to apply teaching principles to a classroom scenario. Some students learned by solely observing the classroom animations, whereas others were presented with the expert's…

A classroom teacher reflects on the benefits of professional development leading to improved and energized student writing. Although traditional professional development sparked interest and encouraged modifications, the support of a teacher inquiry group as ongoing professional development provided the impact needed to effect significant change…

Films are often used in schools to illustrate geography, but doing so may favor mainly passive learning. An experiment with twenty-eight pupils aged thirteen years (a whole class) had the aim of using cinema to promote active geographical learning. First, it was ascertained what the dominant geographical stereotypes were among the pupils and the…

The application of mobile technologies to learning has the potential to facilitate the active participation of learners in the creation and delivery of content. Mobile technologies can also provide a powerful connection between a variety of formal and informal learning contexts and can help to build a community of learners. However these versatile…

The population growth together with the unsustainable consumption pattern is putting increasing stress on the planet's natural resources. The increasing realisation that humans are harming the environment is taking the form of a global movement intended to change behaviour towards sustainability, now recognised as a framework that links humans to…

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Engineers at Marshall Space Flight Center, Dryden Flight Research Center, and their partners at other NASA centers and in private industry are currently developing X-33, a prototype to test technologies for the next generation of space transportation. This single-stage-to-orbit reusable launch…

Virtual worlds have been linked with e-learning applications to create virtual learning environments (VLEs) for the past decade. However, while they can support many educational activities that extend both traditional on-campus teaching and distance learning, they are used primarily for learning content generated and managed by instructors. With…

The Exploring Florida Science project goals were: (1) increasing content knowledge of secondary science teachers, specifically in topics that are important to the future of the state, and (2) providing secondary science students with digital media for use in project-based learning. A team of instructional designers, educators, scientists, web…