Involving children three and four years of age, studies examined the basis for the difficulty of discriminating between left-right orientations of a shape in standard two-choice task. It was concluded that difficulty of left-right judgments lies in the cognitive demands of the task and is to be understood in the same terms as other problems in…

Student understanding of 30 nontechnical words used in science was investigated. No significant differences were found between the understanding of nontechnical words in science or between the verbal reasoning ability of males (n=108) and females (n=89). Of the four different question formats, students had the most difficulty with the synonym…

This response to Norman Bray (EC 609 160) analyzes the methodology and findings of the original study and concludes that studies of strategy production must look at not only the mentally retarded child's cognitive capacities in problem solving but also the social and contextual conditions that affect the child's representation and use of…

Study One examined Swedish and American children's understanding of what constitutes fair criteria for the distribution of goods (i.e., distributive justice). Study Two compared children's distributive justice in family and peer contexts, and Study Three attempted a longitudinal assessment of distributive justice reasoning in two different…

This article provides an empirical evaluation of an indexing technology, topic maps (ISO 13250), in the context of an academic task in a higher education context. Topic maps are a form of indexing that define and display the interrelationships between various topics in a given domain, as well as anchor these topics to specific resources that help…

The Mathematics Education Research Group of Australia (MERGA) was officially constituted in 1980. In 1984, MERGA produced the first review of the mathematics education research carried out in that region. This book is the third in that series of research reviews. An overview provides the context in which the Australian research was conducted and…

Reports a study to examine secondary school students' (n=200) responses to two figurally and spatially similar problems from mathematics and science that require different responses before and after instruction. Results indicated that most students gave the same response to both questions. Reasons for this pattern are discussed. (MDH)

The "Thinking Mathematics" approach to teaching is guided by two ideas: (1) that learning requires knowledge upon which new problems and situations are interpreted and (2) that mathematics skills are applied in context. This paper reports research that examined whether teaching mathematics students in high school remedial classes can be…

Uses test questions from the Basic Economics Test (BET) to reveal that elementary students are capable of understanding economics concepts. Maintains that neither ethnic background nor parental income makes a difference in economic learning. The most statistically significant determinant of improved scores was the extent to which a concept was…

Reviews research on elementary school students' capacity for historical understanding. Suggests Piagetian theory is not applicable to historical thinking. Considers teaching approaches for developing elementary history instruction, including (1) embedding history in meaningful context; (2) use of narrative; (3) linking past and present; and (4)…

The researcher conducted a six-month ethnographic study as an apprentice carpenter in Cape Town, South Africa, to document the valid mathematical ideas that are embedded in the everyday woodworking activities of a group of carpenters. A secondary objective was to examine and to give a firsthand account of the teaching and learning of mathematical…