First graders engaged in an extended historical inquiry. Close readings of secondary and primary sources evoked rich class discussion. Scaffolding directed students' scrutiny of secondary sources for historical gaps; they ably detected source and intent within the primary sources. Students articulated newly constructed understandings through…

Research has focused on students' difficulties understanding phenomena in which agency is distributed across actors whose individual-level behaviors converge to result in collective outcomes. Building on Levy and Wilensky (2008), this study identified features of distributed causality students understand and that may offer affordances for…

A new method for teaching advanced laboratories at the undergraduate level is presented. The intent of this approach is to get students more engaged in the lab experience and apply critical thinking skills to solve problems. The structure of the lab is problem-based and provides students with a research-like experience. Students read the current…

This paper describes a unit of instruction about media images--how they work, ways they affect people, and means to use them--in which young adolescents learn the consequences of becoming a media-literate consumer. The paper explains that in the unit, divided into 2 "clusters," 110 Boston-area eighth graders share 5 core academic…