For may early childhood teachers, angry voices of children are heard all too often. When children focus on protecting themselves and surviving conflicts, they miss out on the joys and opportunities the early childhood program has to offer. Without the ability to solve problems in their interactions with others, children are not able to peacefully…

The purpose of the technology fair is to enhance technological problem-solving skills. This article discusses a technology fair centered on a university/school partnership, which raised the level of complexity both with administrative and scientific issues. The end result of such partnerships is that schools have the opportunity to demonstrate an…

The momentum gathering behind authentic learning/critical skills raises fundamental issues concerning teaching and learning. This article discusses some of the more general arguments surrounding authentic learning with particular reference to an in-depth evaluation of its impact on schools in one part of Great Britain. It then moves on to describe…

This article reports on the use of a unique number system to facilitate teachers' understanding of the concepts of place value. Teachers' mastery of base-ten may hinder their recognition of the difficulties students have with place value, so the authors created a number system that used five symbols to represent values. Using this system, teachers…

Students are rarely given the opportunity of being decisionmakers in class, and when they are, they may feel unsure of how to organize their own learning. However, over time they come to appreciate the benefits of a more active engagement in learning English. In this paper, I describe a procedure based on Exploratory Practice (EP) for guiding…

Education today for the work of tomorrow must take on an entirely new look if the United States is to remain competitive in the global economy. Today, students need to be critical thinkers and problem solvers, have excellent communication and digital literacy skills and master challenging core content. This paper presents "Pathways to…

This paper provides a synopsis of a research report done by the Youth Project of the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR), an autonomous institute with the University of Cape Town. In 1992 the Human Sciences Research Council initiated a cooperative research programme into South African youth and the problems and challenges they face. CCR was…

The limited language capability of CAI systems has made it difficult to personalize problem-solving instruction. The intelligent tutoring system, ALBERT, is a problem-solving monitor and coach that has been used with high school and college level physics students for several years; it uses a natural language system to understand kinematics…

As a person learns, his problem solving ability improves and one reason for this is the increased acquisition of "macro-rules" which make problem solving more efficient. An intelligent computer assisted learning (ICAI) system is being developed which automatically acquires the useful knowledge from the domain experts; as experts give the learning…

Novices in programming face many problems affecting their learning process and programming success. Learning to program includes using the programming environment, learning a programming language's syntax and semantics, understanding a problem and translating it into an executable plan, developing algorithms and programs, and testing and debugging…

As far back as the 1960s, research and statistics began to demonstrate what appeared to be an inequality in the criminal justice system in that minorities, particularly black males, were being arrested and confined in numbers far greater than their proportion to the general population. The Coalition for Juvenile Justice, in conjunction with…

This monograph is a resource for educators who wish to explore environmental problem solving. It consists of five parts. Chapter 1 presents a psychological perspective on problem solving and its implications for teaching problem solving skills in an interdisciplinary arena. Chapter 2 presents four approaches to developing environmental problem…

In introductory psychology courses, the desire to cover content can conflict with the desire to acquaint students with psychological thinking processes. The IDEAL method is a group problem solving quiz technique which addresses both of these goals. In the process, instructors choose key concepts from a given reading and divide the class into…

This paper provides an introduction to a particular systems-theoretical approach to problem-solving in the management of education usually referred to as soft-systems methodology (SSM), developed by Peter Checkland in the 1970s. SSM should provide a powerful tool for managers in education at any level who have a strategic role because it can be…

The Space Exposed Experiment Developed for Students (SEEDS) Project offered science classes at the 5-12 and college levels the opportunity to conduct experiments involving tomato seeds that had been space-exposed over long periods of time. SEEDS kits were complete packages obtained from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for…