For researchers seeking to improve education, a common goal is to identify teaching practices that have causal benefits in classroom settings. To test whether an instructional practice exerts a causal influence on an outcome measure, the most straightforward and compelling method is to conduct an experiment. While experimentation is common in laboratory studies of learning, experimentation is increasingly rare in classroom settings, and to date, researchers have argued it is prohibitively expensive and difficult to conduct experiments on education in situ. To address this challenge, we present Terracotta (Tool for Education Research with RAndomized COnTrolled TriAls), an open-source web application that integrates with a learning management system to provide a comprehensive experimental research platform within an online class site. Terracotta automates randomization, informed consent, experimental manipulation of different versions of learning activities, and export of de-identified research data. Here we describe these features, and the results of a live classroom demonstration study using Terracotta.

Building on the work of interdisciplinary literary and dance scholars from Frank Kermode to Carrie Preston, this paper attends to depictions of Isadora Duncan appearing in novels, poems, and portraits by modernist writers such as Max Eastman, John Dos Passos, and Gertrude Stein, among others. These diversely experimental texts hold in common a preoccupation with Duncan's perpetual motion, emphasizing shifts in her personal life, choreography, and performance quality over time. “Writing Bodies” theorizes the different expressive roles her image takes on, arguing that the texts use Duncan's image to query the relationship between embodied movement and its literary representations.

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