An open-ended assignment to "make something" out of cardboard was a good fit for a half-day camp class of children in kindergarten, first, and second grades where the first goal was to have fun while learning. Given the opportunity to make something of their own design for their own purposes out of cardboard, the children persisted while…

The purpose of this study was to examine if student understanding of new material could be promoted by manipulating the perceptual factors experienced at the time of learning. It was hypothesized that the thematic relevance of perceptual factors would be a significant contributor to learner understanding. To test this hypothesis, one hundred…

Design research studies provide significant opportunities to study new innovations and approaches and how they affect the forms of learning in complex classroom ecologies. This paper reports on a two-week long design research study with twelve 2nd through 4th graders using curricular materials and a tablet-based diagnostic assessment system, both…

The reported exploratory study consisted primarily of classroom visits, videotaped sessions, and post-treatment interviews whereby second graders (n = 12) worked on problems in planar geometry, individually and in triads, using physical and virtual manipulatives. The goal of the study was to: 1) characterize the nature of geometric thinking found…

(Purpose) The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of classroom sound field amplification on communication in kindergarten through grade 3 classrooms. (Methodology) Sixty classrooms were involved in the study; half of the classrooms were provided with sound field amplification. The flow of communication was measured through…