4th International Scientific and Professional Conference Intercultural Education and especially this proceedings of scientific and professional papers authored by scientists and practitioners contributes to greater sensitivity to diversity and the creation of an inclusive culture of life in educational institutions and in a multicultural…

The purpose of this study was to explore the integration of vidcasts as student-generated products in English as a second language (ESL) classrooms. We collected qualitative data through observations, student artifacts, and semistructured interviews from 16 reading students at a public middle school located in the southwestern United States. Study…

This paper aims to reflect on the teaching of statistics through student research, in the form of projects carried out by students on self-selected topics. The paper reports on a study carried out with two undergraduate classes using a methodology of teaching that we call "learning projects." Monitoring the development of the various…

This study introduces the Listening to Others' Voices (LOV) project, an empowering strategy in geography education. This research aims to create a dataset detailing the perspectives of negatively stereotyped countries with respect to how their countries are portrayed in geography textbooks and to investigate the pedagogical effects of the LOV…

Despite it being the second decade of the 21st century, there still exists a range of definitions of what a 21st century learning environment is. This can be troublesome for teacher educators as we strive to prepare teachers for environments we can't clearly describe. In order to describe a 21st century learning environment, we developed an IC Map…

It is well established that active learning helps students engage in high-level thinking strategies and develop improved cognitive skills. Motivation and self-regulated learning research, however, illustrates that cognitive engagement is an effortful process that is related to students' valuing of the learning tasks, adoption of internalized goal…

Many educators have created successful innovative models but have had difficulty sustaining, re-creating, and scaling these models. Classrooms and schools characterized by student-centered learning practices typically deviate from the norms of transmission teaching and the many structures and procedures that David Tyack and Larry Cuban called the…

One of the mysteries of education reform is how leaders and educators can successfully instantiate, sustain, and spread student-centered pedagogical practices from a few schools to many others. Advocates for "deeper learning" grapple with this mystery as they seek to transform teaching and learning to prepare students to meet the demands…

Recent studies on professional development programs indicate these programs, when sustained, have a positive impact on student achievement; however, many of these studies have failed to use longitudinal data. The purpose of this study is to understand how one particular instructional practice (STEM PBL) used consistently influences student…

Paul Jablon's "The Synergy of Inquiry" (2014) is well-timed. The 2014 deadline set by No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2002) for universal student proficiency has come and gone, and according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, "proficiency rates last year were below 50 percent for nearly every racial and ethnic group, in…

This article presents first results of an ethnographic research project in a Luxembourgish primary school that accompanied the development of a school project by children from the fifth grade. Analysing the data children themselves collected with Kodak Zi8 cameras in order to document their project activities, it investigates their possibilities…

My unit on sound and waves is embedded within a long-term project in which my high school students construct a musical instrument out of common materials. The unit culminates with a performance assessment: students play the first four measures of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"--chosen because of the octave interval of the first two notes--in the key…

In Mr. Wood's technology class, students learned about many aspects of engineering, including design of a product, teamwork, testing hypotheses, and testing the final product. In this article, the author describes how his class, particularly his team, applied everything they learned about the process to their kayak design challenge using the IDEAL…

A short conducting pipe that hangs from a weak spring is forced to oscillate by the magnetic field of a surrounding coaxial coil that has been excited by a low-frequency current source in the presence of an additional static magnetic field. Induced oscillating currents appear in the pipe. The pipe motion becomes damped by the dragging forces…

This article discusses a creative visualization project to motivate and engage students. Students depict a dinosaur in its ecosystem and include all three elements of the environment: air, land, and water. Students explore scientific content in evolution, natural selection, food webs, ecosystems and geologic time. (Contains 6 figures.)