This article responds to the exponential growth in academic textbooks on Western or American Buddhism by arguing that popular trade books written by Buddhist teachers in the West make more effective tools for teaching and learning about the growth of Buddhism in western societies. The use of such texts in the classroom provides students with…

Central to the argument about the influence of media on learning is how this influence is measured or ascertained. Conventional methods which comprise the use of true and quasi-experimental designs are inadequate. Several lessons can be learned from this observation on the media debate. The first is that, conventional methods of ascertaining the…

The challenge for education in today's knowledge age is developing students' capacity for sustained creative work with ideas. Although even the youngest students don't fear the abstract, working to improve ideas is an acquired disposition. Creative production is a progressive design process. Software is described in which students, as a community,…

Active engagement in the classroom is one of the best tools available for overcoming conceptual difficulties. Science educators agree that students of all ages learn more by participating actively in the interpretation of scientific phenomena (NAS 2003; NSF 1998). In this article, the authors describe demonstrations in class using paper wads as an…

Teachers using a constructivist approach to learning are not invisible, as Lawrence Baines and Gregory Stanley suggest in a December 2000 "Kappan" article. Rather, they are an integral part of an active, student-centered learning process. Assisted by teachers, learners select and transform information, construct hypotheses, and make decisions.…