LearningLeads: Research-based K 12 Instructional Resources

Address safety in your school and community—in your curriculum, in your policies, in your system.

Start by looking into complete programs that address your needs. Review our research synthesis on each, and the alignment to authorized activities in the U.S. Dept. of Ed.'s Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act. Check out Effective SDFS Programs.

Interested in lessons that infuse safety learning into activities in core subject areas? Check out the Better Tomorrow Series.

Interested in infusing your curriculum with home safety routines and tips. Make it exciting. Get Safety Smart. Students in grades 4-8 go behind the scenes at Underwriters Laboratories® and discover how products that use electricity are tested to keep us safe. Students from kindergarten through grade 3 join Timon and Pumbaa, the lovable characters from The Lion King, with UL safety checklists in hand as they investigate a new home to see if it a safe place to live.

Engage your students in real scientific inquiry. It's messy, argumentative, full of fun, and far removed from the simplistic processes of what textbooks call the scientific method.

Start with a look into the controversy surrounding Mitochondrial Eve. Check out Mapping Eve!

Interested in the issues surrounding genetically modified foods, antibiotics, nuclear energy, and more? Check out Designed Instruction's cutting edge teacher guides in The Eyes of Nye.

In this strand, we begin at the earliest grades (PreK-2) with a focus on linear measurement. Get the initial synopsis of the developmental research, implications of instructional design, and a sample learning trajectory that connects the research and design components into a usable sequence for learning.

Or, go to the overview for Measurement, Geometry, and Spatial Sense.

Get the research and read about the usefulness of building context when working with source materials from the past.

Go to the Learning Through Context overview page.

Like working with historical source documents in your classroom? Go to the CASE (Context Analysis Source Explorations) overview page.

And how about the present for a little context? In the hit ABC News series below, Designed Instruction provides you with video clips organized according to key standards, making it easy to bring the context to students within your present curriculum. The questions can come alive: What is the legacy of tension in North Korea, and how could it be a threat to us today? How is China emerging, and why should the United States take notice? Are we at the root of the global warming, and if so, what can we do about it?

Often called the "essence of reading," it is crucial to future success in any discipline. Fortunately, the body of research evidence regarding reading comprehension instruction has grown in recent years. Go to the overview for Reading Comprehension, or directly to the articles to read about teaching for vocabulary and text understanding, then find out about the implications of oral reading (K-2) or story structure instruction (3-6) on students' abilities to comprehend what they read.

Teach reading at grades 3-6? Check out the teaching unit Learning Story Structure: An instructional guide for improving reading comprehension.

The unit includes a detailed teacher's guide as well as all instructional masters, student handouts, and assessment support materials needed to get started right away. All based on the evidence... All you need is a good story!

Questioning... an age-old instructional strategy whose potential has never been fully tapped (and there's a reason). From the overview page on Questioning, you can access articles that describe how to teach students to generate operational questions in domain-specific fields (e.g., science and history), utilize strategies such as eliciting prompts and dialogic talk to spur question generation, and assess the quality of student-generated questions.

Models are used as learning tools by specialists in fields from medicine to physical sciences, mathematics to engineering, and history to literature. Since early mankind, we've connected interrelated ideas and components through functional models, cast them physically into a variety of representations, and used them to explain and test ideas, concepts, processes, and phenomena. Do our students get the same opportunities?

Check out Modeling for Learning: Addressing Student Misconceptions for a few great tips on putting models to work in your class.