Instructional Science

In any US school, even in schools with strong commitments to equity, colleagues and administrators may make deficit-oriented, prejudiced, and/or problematic comments about students and families. These harmful comments are often fueled by white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, etc., and we refer to them as politically charged scenarios or dilemmas. When politically charged situations arise, teachers and teacher candidates, or TCs, need to take action and advocate for students, especially for students of marginalized and minoritized backgrounds. Attention to politically charged dilemmas is especially timely with current events such as recent executive orders eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, attempts to dismantle the United States Department of Education, and prior anti-Critical Race Theory attacks that push equity-minded teachers out of schools. This qualitative case study investigates white female elementary TCs’ understandings about the role of emotions when presented with politically charged dilemmas in their elementary mathematics methods course. The authors theorize emotional tools of creative insubordination, which emerged from the data as TCs described how they would respond to the various politically charged scenarios. Emotional tools of creative insubordination refer to actions that leverage emotions in order to advocate for students, especially those of marginalized backgrounds, such as regulating or de-escalating emotions, leveraging empathy, revealing emotions, and being comfortable being “called out” (or called in). The emotional tools of creative insubordination offer strategies for teachers and TCs to advocate for students’ learning and well-being to ultimately promote equity and justice in schools and society.

The gender achievement gap in higher STEM education is well documented as STEM course grades often show a bias favoring men, even when controlling for overall student achievements. The current work, which was preregistered prior to data collection, replicates and extends prior work to evaluate several possible contributors to the gender gap in advanced STEM courses. The contributing factors include students’ STEM-preparedness, learning assessment design, and students’ activity level in the course. We analyzed the data of a cohort of 315 undergraduate engineering students in a leading technological university in Israel. A mixed-effect model analysis revealed a gender gap in both high-stakes and low-stakes assessments of learning. We found that the gap first appears in lower-division undergraduate mathematics courses and remains steady through advanced STEM courses, with relatively little variance between different courses. We further found that students’ activity in the course’s learning management system is not associated with a gap reduction. The analysis suggests that the gender gap can be traced back, at least in part, to students’ STEM-preparedness when entering college. Notably, although the gap is traced prior to college, high-school grades likely show a ceiling effect and are thus not representative of the gap shown later in college. Therefore, it may be that other preparatory factors contribute to this gap, outside of or in addition to high-school performance.

Although students often acknowledge the importance of feedback, they generally struggle to engage with it and act upon it. Specific pedagogical factors, such as poorly structured feedback, unsuitable tone, and weak educator-student relationships, can impede effective utilisation of feedback. Students also exhibit varying degrees of comprehension, engagement, and action in response to feedback. Despite these observations, there is a lack of empirical studies systematically investigating diverse feedback experiences, practices, and action-taking behaviours of students. This paper addresses this gap by reporting on a study that aimed to explore students’ current feedback practices, self-reported action-taking behaviours, and perceived challenges related to students’ sensemaking and action-taking processes. A sample of 641 students from higher education was surveyed to investigate: (a) their feedback experiences, including practices, attitudes and beliefs; (b) variations in their motivations and emotional responses to feedback; and (c) variations in students’ perceived challenges in understanding and acting on feedback. The study employed 29 Likert scale items and latent class analysis (LCA) to identify four distinct classes of students based on their feedback experiences, aiming to uncover heterogeneity in their inclination to act upon feedback and challenges experienced in the feedback process. Additionally, thematic analysis of four open-ended questions captured a comprehensive understanding of their challenges, motivations, and emotional responses to feedback. The analysis revealed that students showed various levels of feedback experiences, engagement, and challenges in the feedback process across different classes. The paper concludes by highlighting the importance of self regulation skills and the social-affective component of a dialogic feedback process. This process can potentially be facilitated by technology-enhanced feedback tools, such as learning analytics (LA) tools.

This study examines the impact of incorporating cloze tests during pauses in classroom instruction as retrieval practice activities, using Audience Response Systems (ARS) for delivery. While ARSs traditionally rely on multiple-choice questions, cloze tests offer a potentially efficient alternative that aligns with retrieval practice principles. Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the efficacy of inserting computer-administered cloze tests during pauses in classroom slideshow lessons using an application called i-cloze. Experiment 1 involved 82 fifth-grade students learning history, and Experiment 2 involved 95 tenth-grade students in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) lessons. Results from Experiment 1 showed no significant benefits of the i-cloze method, likely due to cognitive overload imposed by the content design, the i-cloze tasks, and limited familiarity with the technology. Experiment 2 demonstrated significant improvements in memory and partial improvements in comprehension for students in the i-cloze condition. These findings suggest that cloze-based retrieval practice, when appropriately aligned with lesson content and student readiness, holds promise as an innovative ARS format. EFL contexts may be especially well suited for this approach. Future research should explore how task complexity, content type, and technological familiarity influence the effectiveness of the i-cloze method in diverse educational settings.

In the pursuit of inclusive classrooms, educators have identified the importance of teachers’ responsiveness to the particular students they teach. To date, research on responsive teaching has emphasized students’ subjectivities. In this study, we use a situative perspective on teacher learning to examine teachers’ subjectivities as they learn and sustain responsive instructional practice. Using fieldnotes, video, and interviews from two critical events, we analyze what happened when teachers encountered students who challenged something core to their visions of teaching, asking, how do contextual resources shape teachers’ responsiveness to students in challenging teaching situations? Through the case analysis, we show that contextual resources shape teachers’ agentic responses in challenging teaching situations, offering different possibilities for their epistemic and relational agency, which, in turn, shapes their interpretations of student behavior. We highlight the emotional labor involved in maintaining responsive teaching, particularly in challenging situations. This paper underscores how teachers’ capacity for responsive instruction can be amplified or reduced by the complex systems and multiple relationships in their schools.

Learning and relational goals are inherently intertwined in collaborative teacher learning. However, they present tensions that facilitators of professional development (PD) groups need to navigate. Scholars increasingly advocate for problem-based, collaborative teacher learning and highlight the central role that emotions play in teacher learning. However, scarce research has examined how facilitators manage emotion display in PD settings, navigating between relational and learning goals. This ethnographic study explores how facilitators respond to teachers' emotional displays and how their responses serve either or both relational and learning goals. We analyzed a case study of a video-recorded problem-based PD program for elementary and middle school science teachers. We used linguistic ethnographic microanalysis to identify seven facilitation strategies and mapped them onto two continuums: (1) recognizing the emotion (relational goal) and (2) exploring the emotion (learning goal). We present rich illustrations for each strategy and argue that it is possible, and in many cases desirable, to navigate the tension between relational and learning goals by integrating the recognition and exploration of emotions. We furthermore suggest that consistently avoiding or preventing the discussion of teacher emotions may constitute emotional rules that exclude emotions from pedagogical discourse and, hence, miss out on a significant dimension of learning to teach.

Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences (MIs) theory has garnered significant attention in recent years. However, the effects of MI-informed tasks on various dimensions of second language (L2) learning require further investigation, particularly within the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context in Iran. Thus, this study explored three key Objectives: First, how MI-informed tasks influence EFL learners’ willingness to communicate (WTC). Second, how these tasks impact academic engagement among EFL learners. Third, whether MI-informed tasks significantly enhance EFL learners’ academic success. For the first two objectives, 20 intermediate-level EFL learners were purposively sampled and invited to participate in semi-structured interviews. For the third objective, 40 intermediate-level EFL learners, aged 18 to 23, were selected from two intact classes at a private language institute and were randomly assigned to a control and an experimental group. The participants underwent a pretest, interventions, and a posttest. The results of the thematic content analysis disclosed that MI-informed tasks positively affected EFL learners’ WTC through engagement and active participation, confidence and self-efficacy, peer interaction and collaboration, variety and engagement in learning activities, and sense of autonomy and empowerment. Additionally, the qualitative results revealed that MI-informed tasks substantially enhanced the EFL learners’ engagement via active participation and involvement, enthusiasm and motivation, collaboration and peer interaction, variety and novelty in learning experiences, and sense of ownership and autonomy. Furthermore, independent t-test results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in terms of academic success. The implications are discussed for various EFL stakeholders.