In this article, the author suggests that college educators need to do more than tell students how to expand upon their careerist reasons for going to college; they also need to help them "feel" the value of that expansion. The author recognizes that this is part of the motivation for proposed structural changes to undergraduate education, such as…

Middle-level teachers can avoid passive seatwork and encourage students to think using a "guided thinking" approach, designed to help adolescents develop more sophisticated thinking and reasoning skills. Essential elements of guided thinking are described, along with an implementation strategy and the principal's role in fostering…

With specific attention to appropriate teaching strategies, the author defines a developmental stage theory of children's interest in and psychological uses for knowledge. The four stages are: mythic (up to approximately age 9/10); romantic (ages 9/10 to 15/16); philosophic (ages 14/15 to 20/21); and ironic (adult). (SJL)

Condensing the teaching of cognitive strategies into a discrete instructional unit is self-defeating. Success in teaching thinking skills results when content objectives are contingent upon activities that also promote thinking and when thinking skills permeate the entire curriculum. (TE)

Many chemists want to be effective teachers but have little background in psychology or education on which to build successful practices. The primary audience for this book is chemistry teachers at the secondary and tertiary levels, and its purpose is to encourage readers to construct a new understanding of how their students learn. This book is…

Explores motivation as a requisite to the educational goal of maximum development of all children's intellectual potential. Considers (1) causal attributions of success and failure and (2) attribution for task choice and involvement, in relation to, respectively, (1) inequality and (2) equality of optimum motivation in schools. (Author/GC)

The Educational Video Center (EVC) is an independent nonprofit media organization that has worked to build students' skills in documentary production and media literacy while nurturing their intellectual development and civic engagement. As founding director of EVC, the author has spent more than 20 years working with students and teachers in New…

The field of early childhood education has long been marked by intense controversy concerning appropriate curriculum and teaching methods and goals. This paper explores some implications of the traditional dichotomies of the field and suggests that while there are many reasons to resist the side that advocates formal academic instruction, it does…

College faculty are not trained for intensely emotional discussion of non-Eurocentric topics that may arise in a diversified curriculum. They must learn to teach students to separate facts from cultural assumptions; shift perspective and acknowledge the validity of other viewpoints; and differentiate between personal discomfort and intellectual…

Argues that the arts are basic to educational development, as they provide the tools and skills that are central to early language development including story, metaphor, rhyme and rhythm, binary structuring and mediation, image formation from words, affective abstraction, and others that underlie more complex learning. (Author)

The action principles and concepts developed in the field of adult education may be generalized to include the practice of continuing medical education. A review of learning theory and research reveals that adult learning varies along four dimensions: (1) ability to accept new information and adopt new practices; (2) approach to learning; (3) ways…

Argues that the arts provide a powerful means with which to promote future-oriented learning because they involve nonverbal, symbolic ways of knowing, thinking and communicating. Suggests that the arts in the emergent curriculum promote central education skills of discovery, pursuit, self-awareness, personal communication, social interaction,…

Argues that children need play time to explore the world because it is valuable, irreplaceable, spontaneous, and provides situations where children can learn with all their senses. Examines play in terms of its role in exploration, imagination, creative activity, work, learning, knowledge expansion, art, and the culture of children. (Author/SD)

This digest summarizes a larger document of the same title which takes the position that because American democracy is founded on the premise that citizens need to engage in free and open discussion of opposing points of view, it is important that intellectual conflict become part of college instruction. It suggests several ways in which…