As of the writing of this report, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are being implemented in 45 states and the District of Columbia. Approaches to implementing the standards, however, are highly varied. For the past 3 years, Research For Action (RFA) has been tracking how one approach to implementing the literacy standards--the Literacy…

This dissertation describes a novel intelligent tutoring system, BeSocratic, which aims to help fill the gap between simple multiple-choice systems and free-response systems. BeSocratic focuses on targeting questions that are free-form in nature yet defined to the point which allows for automatic evaluation and analysis. The system includes a set…

This instructional module, which is used in a principal certification graduate class entitled School and Community Relations, is fixed within the literature that describes school stakeholders' confusion about the explicit roles of school counselors, especially principals. The authors begin by creating a framework for the lesson activity in which…

Most undergraduate chemistry courses and a few high school honors courses, which focus on physical chemistry and quantum mechanics, are highly mathematically-oriented. At the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, we developed a new module for high school students, titled "Chemistry--From 'the Hole' to 'the Whole': From the Nanoscale to…

A combination of regular classroom teaching with the use of resources available on the Moodle platform has been designed to foster the development of skills for learning to learn for students in an undergraduate general chemistry course. The use of the Moodle platform essentially aimed at strengthening the students' prior knowledge of…

We investigated how students articulate uncertainty when they are engaged in structured scientific argumentation tasks where they generate, examine, and interpret data to determine the existence of exoplanets. In this study, 302 high school students completed 4 structured scientific arguments that followed a series of computer-model-based…

Migrant and seasonal farmworkers are typically Spanish-speaking, Latino immigrants with limited formal education and low literacy skills and, as such, are a vulnerable population. We describe the development of the "Pesticides and Farmworker Health Toolkit", a pesticide safety and health curriculum designed to communicate to farmworkers…

High school students have had some difficulties in understanding chemistry due to traditional ways of teaching this specific science. It is important to improve teaching methods that increase student motivation, not only to enhance their capacity for understanding, but also to generate a greater level of interest in the study of chemistry for…

This study explores the adoption of the team-based learning (TBL) method in knowledge-based and theory-oriented journalism and mass communication (J&MC) courses. It first reviews the origin and concept of TBL, the relevant theories, and then introduces the TBL method and implementation, including procedures and assessments, employed in an…

Within recent years, there is an increasing need to train students, from biology and beyond, in quantitative methods that are relevant to cope with data-driven biology. Systems Biology is such a field that places a particular focus on the functional aspect of biology and molecular interacting processes. This paper deals with the conceptual design…

In 2008, Macquarie University instituted the Participation and Community Engagement (PACE) initiative. This initiative embeds units in the curriculum that involve learning through participation (LTP) that is mutually beneficial to the student, the University and the organisation or community in which student participation activities take place.…

This study aimed to design a teaching sequence for science education that enabled lower secondary school students to enhance their motivation towards science. Further, it looked to examine the way the designed teaching sequence affected students with different motivational profiles. Industry site visits, with embodied theory-based motivational…

Psychology students at the Open University (OU) can choose whether to complete their project work at residential school or by participating in an online equivalent. This study identifies different factors governing module choice and student experience: When choosing residential school, social aspects are important, whereas for online, students are…

A librarian and faculty member collaborated on creating a library research module for students in the faculty member's college success classes to help them learn the fundamentals of information literacy. Using the assignment "My Ideal Job," the students met four or more times with the librarian in a computer classroom to learn how to do…

Loyola University Chicago's Teaching, Learning, and Leading With Schools and Communities (TLLSC) program is an ambitious break from traditional university-based teacher preparation models. This clinically based initial teacher preparation program, fully embedded in local schools and community organizations, takes an ecological perspective on the…