Over the last few years, headlines from diverse arenas--grocery store newsstands to academic literature--repeatedly voiced evidence that people are living in a transformational time. "Change" was not only the go-to buzzword of choice in the 2008 presidential campaign but also a signifier of mutations in all areas of people's lives. Therefore, this…

Infusing technology into art education practice has been a continuous endeavor for preservice and in-service art teacher education. In recent years, art educators around the world have researched issues related to the preparation of art teacher technology competencies, including art teacher perceptions of working with technology, implementations…

E-learning has seen incredible growth in the first decade of the 21st century. This growth is particularly noticeable in institutions of higher education. Even though distance learning has long been the method by which remote students have obtained course credit through correspondence study, e-learning is popular even among traditional on-campus…

For centuries people from around the world have celebrated storytelling and puppetry for their educational and social functions. In the comprehensive curriculum, storytelling combined with puppet performances enriches the classroom experience by providing students with opportunities to engage in open dialogue, creativity, and structured play.…

As new media emerge in the common culture, the authors recommend that art educators adopt those media to facilitate deep understanding of visual culture and literacy. They report here on applications of an online image gallery that helps users develop ways to interpret what they see and compose. Over the past few years the authors have…

In classrooms where lecture is the method of instruction, information often is transmitted with little or no dialogue from a person who possesses knowledge (such as an instructor) to a person who lacks knowledge (such as a student). The authors found this instructional model to be limited. As a result, they integrated second-generation Web or "Web…

3-D animated virtual worlds are no longer only for gaming. With the advance of technology, animated virtual worlds not only are found on every computer, but also connect users with the internet. Today, virtual worlds are created not only by companies, but also through the collaboration of users. Online 3-D animated virtual worlds provide a new…

As part of a 5-year professional development intervention aimed at improving science and literacy achievement of English language learning (ELL) students in urban elementary schools, this study examined fourth-grade students' science achievement across a 3-year (2005-2008) implementation of our professional development intervention consisting of…

Student understanding of biological representations has not been well studied. Yet, we know that to be efficient problem solvers in evolutionary biology and systematics, college students must develop expertise in thinking with a particular type of representation, phylogenetic trees. The purpose of this study was to understand how undergraduates…

We focused on young, low-income, African American children in first- to third-grade classrooms where they experienced varied forms of interactive, participatory, and dialogic pedagogy in the context of yearlong, integrated science-literacy instruction. Using conversations that started around children's own science journals, which were an important…

This study attends to the possibilities of analyzing students' writings at a lexicogrammatical level in terms of their use of linguistic resources, and the insights afforded by this approach into the challenges students faced when they employed the language of school science related to the phenomenon of expansion. For the purpose of this study,…

As the global economic crisis continues, sustaining the United States' position as a leader in research and development is a top concern of policy makers. Looking to increase the number of students pursuing degrees in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), calls for improved mathematics and science education abound. We completed…

This article examines the use and role of the term "experiment" in science teacher education as described by teacher students. Data were collected through focus group interviews conducted at seven occasions with 32 students from six well-known Swedish universities. The theoretical framework is a sociocultural and pragmatist perspective on language…

Curriculum materials are important resources with which teachers make pedagogical decisions about the design of science learning environments. To become well-started beginning elementary teachers capable of engaging their students in inquiry-based science, preservice elementary teachers need to learn to use science curriculum materials…

Much has been written about higher education's increasing reliance on contingent academic labor over the last few decades. The narrative, which includes differing accounts of what, or who, is most to blame, has been well rehearsed: the increase came in slow and steady waves tied to significant political and economic events, including postwar…