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High quality teaching involves deep content knowledge, understanding students and their learning processes, and complex skills of teaching and assessment. Students who experience high quality teaching tend to achieve higher annual growth rates. This study used a descriptive, qualitative research model to explore excellence in social studies teaching. Purposive sample was used to select district coordinators (n = 4) and their highest quality social studies teachers (n = 9). The process of phenomenological decontextualizing and recontextualizing produced five structural themes. Excellent social studies teachers have intellectual identities that focus on having deep content knowledge and a commitment to learning. They use their deep content knowledge to help students find relevancy. They view themselves as curriculum designers who find and curate their own resources. They facilitate student-centered learning experiences that engage students, encourage inquiry, and allow for student dialogue. Lastly, excellent social studies teachers design learning experiences to get students to think critically about different perspectives, synthesize multiple sources or viewpoints, and consider the lesser told stories of history. These contextualized, phenomenological structures reflect the teaching demands of common frameworks of social studies pedagogy including ambitious teaching approaches, authentic intellectual work, and the college, career, and civic life (C3) framework.

According to the National Conference of State Legislature (NCSL), the total population of individuals (including authorized and unauthorized immigrants) in the United States is 319 million, and one in five U.S. residents speak a language at home other than English (Camarota & Zeigler, 2014). With the increasing number of English Language Learners (ELLs) on the rise throughout Texas and the rest of the country, it is important to develop a "safe" space for these individuals to express themselves while practicing the four components (reading, writing, listening, and speaking) of English language learning. This crux of this paper delves into the sub-culture of Cosplay while simultaneously providing practical suggestions from research-based sources for teachers to develop their pedagogy in order to help ELLs practice their English skills in an environment unlike any other.

Despite dedication of tremendous resources to developing literary proficiencies, advanced readers may remain an underserved and understudied population. This qualitative study included nine preadolescent participants aged 10-12 years who demonstrated reading comprehension abilities within the top 10% on a national normed achievement battery. The researchers gathered interview data from participants with corroborating evidence from their parents and their book club teacher. The grounded theory analyses found advanced readers to demonstrate superior reading comprehension and the ability to read entire books quickly. Participants reported positive attitudes toward reading in general and preferred out of school reading over the limiting structures of school reading. Some evidence supported a connection between reading and identity exploration through narrative imagination and empathetic relations to characters and narratives. Advanced readers may present cognitive characteristics, as well as behaviors and motivations that require differentiated learning designs.

Summary This article explores the management of skeletal pin sites focusing on the research that underpins current practice. The effectiveness of pin site care depends on assessment and delivery of [...]

This study evaluated the impact of a debate intervention on students' critical thinking. The design-based research project included a quasi-experimental, one group pre-test, post-test design. Results indicated small effect sizes on critical thinking using the Cornell Critical Thinking Test-Level X (d = 0.40) and an assessment of argument analysis (d = 0.41). High-ability students entered the project with stronger critical thinking than general-education students (d = .82; d = .41), and high-ability students appeared to benefit more from the intervention as the performance gaps increased in the post-test phase (d = 1.08; d = .80) suggesting possible aptitude-treatment interactions or the Matthew effect. Qualitative data indicated that students learned to (a) think on the spot, (b) analyze arguments, (c) see other perspectives, and (d) construct counter-arguments. This study corroborates previous research that indicated a relationship between high ability and critical thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the importance of blended learning in educating gifted students. Topics include gifted individuals being those who demonstrate levels of aptitude or competence in one or more domains, important component of learning being the personalized instruction that allows choice in assignments and control over pacing for the students, and blended learning being an approach to education that prioritizes personalization for gifted learners.

The article explores the history of policing and examines police brutality in the implementation of law enforcement in the U.S. It addresses whether race, gender, sexual orientation or ethnicity in contributing to incidents of police brutality and reviews the common misconceptions on police brutality. It defines qualified immunity and its application to police officials and gives possible solutions to combat the police brutality problem facing American society.

This article discusses the statutes governing mothers who kill their children within twelve months of giving birth as a result of their postpartum disorders in the U.S. There is no such standardized treatment or statute to guide judges and juries about such a case. This article addresses the viability of the insanity defense when applied to the phenomenon of infanticide. In addition, this article explores the similarities of the circumstances of some infanticide cases.

Psychological factors have been shown to be inter-related and to predict various outcome measures such as academic performance, as indexed by grade point average (GPA). Findings from previous studies investigating relations among psychological factors and academic performance have used mainly white samples, which do not necessarily generalize to African-American students. Building on the academic prediction research, along with examining the role of conscientiousness in academic performance, the present study examined the relations among the psychological factors of self-esteem, self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, conscientiousness, and academic performance using a sample of African-American students (N = 205). Results, which partially support previous research findings, indicated that psychological factors were inter-related, but not significant predictors of academic performance for African-American students; except for self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation which significantly predicted academic performance of African-American students. Contrary to previous studies, conscientiousness was not a significant predictor of academic performance for the sample of African American students in the present study. The results from the study may be beneficial to many schools and colleges when predicting the academic performance of African-American students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]