A fifth-grade teacher describes her investigation of direct teaching of collaborative skills, explaining how she taught explicit cooperative skills and documented her findings. The teacher describes patterns of higher-quality journal entries, improved collaborative skills, increased self-esteem, transfer of collaborative skills to new contexts,…

Reviews the information-processing approach to problem solving to apply research findings to cooperative problem solving in social studies classes. Provides examples of how experts and novices solved problems in a study on domestic Soviet affairs. Delineates a problem-solving instructional strategy by explaining nine guidelines that employ…

In an experimental program, problem-based learning was used as the primary instructional method for a one-month primary-care internal medicine rotation on AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) patient care. Resident, tutor, and faculty perceptions of the problem-based approach were positive. Despite substantial initial planning, little…

Reports on a field project that allowed students to engage in problem solving, gather field data, and apply geographic concepts and tools. Students conducted a topographic survey of a shoreline and classified, counted, and weighed litter collected from the shoreline. Discusses the classification system and the students' findings. (MJP)

A law school course in advanced corporate legal practice is described. The course, a series of simulated lawyering tasks centered on a hypothetical leveraged buyout transaction, is designed to go beyond basic legal analysis to develop professional expertise in legal problem solving. The course description includes goals, syllabus design,…

The issue of physical punishment is a particularly controversial one at the moment as child advocates are engaged in a struggle to persuade the New Zealand government to repeal a defence in law (section 59 of the 1961 "Crimes Act") which justifies parents hitting their children provided the force used is "reasonable in the…

Training firefighters is a difficult process in which emotions and nonverbal behaviors play an important role. The authors have developed a mixed reality environment for training a small group of firefighters, which takes into account these aspects. The assessment of the environment was made up of three phases: assessing the virtual agents to…

The purpose of this article is to present an argument for the need for culturally responsive Response to Intervention (RTI) as an approach for reducing disproportionate minority representation in Special Education Programs for Students with Emotional Disturbances. We present an overview of the RTI model as initially intended for use in determining…

A study assessed the effectiveness of the standard report writing segment of two postsecondary courses in English as a Second Language one in accounting and one in secretarial communication, at a Hong Kong polytechnic. The 69 subjects were in 4 groups, one in each subject receiving instruction with a problem-solving approach and one in each…

The experience of Central Pennsylvania's Keystone Central School District (KCSD) illustrated how microcomputers can help solve some of the characteristic problems of rural schools. KCSD's Renovo Elementary School has 3 stand-alone microcomputers and the district's Buckeye High School has 12 networked microcomputers. One major benefit of the…

The goal of the Pre Teacher Assessment Center is to give college sophomores a diagnostic assessment of their potential teaching skills across 13 skill dimensions felt to be prerequisites for teaching. The pre teacher assessment provides students with detailed information about potential teaching strengths and weaknesses and helps remediate…

In 1980, Kentucky reported the nation's lowest percentage of adults, aged 25 and older, who had graduated from high school. Legislators were inundated with recommendations for reform. The result was the enactment of the Parent and Child Education (PACE) pilot program (1986). In the PACE program, parents without high school diplomas attend classes…

An integrated program is presented that focuses on helping students understand the scientific principles behind the natural events they experience and the technologies they use daily in their lives. Students' abilities are developed to ask questions, investigate and experiment, gather, analyze and assess scientific laws and principles and their…

Workshop and seminar summaries and abstracts of papers from the twelfth international conference on improving university teaching are presented. Theme presentation and seminar topics are: distance education; ways that associations improve university teaching; corporate, labor, university partnerships; and teaching part-time students. Workshop…

The International Environmental Education Programme (IEEP) of UNESCO has developed a series of teacher training modules in environmental education. This experimental module focuses on the pre-service training of secondary school science teachers and supervisors. The six chapters of the document address: (1) the environmental problem and…