This study examines patterns of literacy instruction in schools adopting three of America's most widely disseminated comprehensive school reform (CSR) programs (the Accelerated Schools Project, America's Choice, and Success for All). Contrary to the view that educational innovations seldom affect teaching practices, the study found large…

From its inception, the Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLC) project included an explicit intention to identify some principles for the enhancement of learning cultures in order to improve student and teacher learning, and a wish to see how effective different strategies could be in this endeavour. The project showed that both…

US government mandates to implement intensive phonics instruction in elementary classrooms invoke an alleged scientific superiority of this approach over more meaning-centered models. But curiously absent from this scientific enterprise is a study of the phonics system itself. Advocates of intensive phonics have not demonstrated that the commonly…

Interactive whiteboards have made quite a splash in classrooms in recent years. When a computer image is projected on the whiteboard using an LCD projector, users can directly control the computer from the whiteboard. In some systems such as Smart and Mimio, the finger is used in place of a mouse to open and run programs or move windows around. In…

The popular reality television show "Amazing Race" involves participants searching for clues and completing tasks as they progress on a journey all over the world. Inspired by the show, the author incorporated some of the tasks from "Amazing Race" with geocaching, a game in which participants use a Global Positioning System…

Three interactive tasks, increasing in the complexity of resource-directing reasoning demands on speaker/storyteller attribution of, and linguistic reference to, the thoughts and intentions of characters in narrative stimuli were performed by Japanese L1 speakers of English. Largely consistent with the claims of the Cognition Hypothesis, results…

One of the missions of education is to prepare children for complex tasks that occur in their cultural environment. By means of abstracting, the effects of this complexity can be reduced. Recent research and theoretical development show us that young children already seem to be able to think abstractly. The acknowledgement of this potential in…

The authors examined teachers' beliefs and classroom practices during a 2-year professional development program that required middle-school teachers to develop, implement, and revise problem-based, interdisciplinary curricula focusing on locally relevant environmental health issues. The results of the study indicate that over the course of the…

The accuracy of achievement test score inferences largely depends on the sensitivity of scores to instruction focused on tested objectives. Sensitivity requirements are particularly challenging for standards-based assessments because a variety of plausible instructional differences across classrooms must be detected. For this study, we developed a…

This article addresses two long-standing tensions in the education of linguistically marginalized youth: (a) the cultural tension, or cultural combat, that such students engage in as they form their linguistic identities, and (b) the tensions between the development of critical language pedagogies and the lack of their broader implementation due…

Influenced by Freinet, Freire, and Sherover-Marcuse, the author describes the evolution of her pedagogy, including a demystifying and empowering approach to working with graduate students in the dissertation process. Alma Flor Ada's educational philosophy and praxis, grounded in critical pedagogy and transformative education, developed in the…

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a diagnostic term now indelibly scored on the public psyche. In some quarters, a diagnosis of ADHD is regarded with derision. In others it is welcomed with relief. Despite intense multidisciplinary research, the jury is still out with regard to the "truth" of ADHD. Not surprisingly, the…

Successful inclusion is facilitated when children with autism fit in and interact in meaningful ways with their typical peers. However, deficits in conversational language likely limit the social attractiveness of children with autism to their classmates. This study evaluated an incidental teaching approach to promoting use of age-appropriate…

Can a rich problem-solving task challenge a diverse range of students? How would students across various grade levels, from elementary school to secondary school, respond to the same task? These were the questions five different teachers in different schools wanted to explore in their respective classes, ranging from first grade through ninth…

This study examined the effect of a social-behavioral learning strategy intervention (Stop-Observe-Deliberate-Act; SODA) on the social interaction skills of one middle school student with Asperger syndrome (AS). More specifically, the study investigated the effect of SODA training on the ability of one student with AS to participate in cooperative…