Background: Nanotechnology, a multidisciplinary field with increasing societal importance, demands for an increase in research abilities and capacities. Yet, nanoscience and nanotechnology (NST) are largely inaccessible to K-12 students. This situation demands efforts in research towards bringing NST learning into K-12 classrooms. Purpose: The…

The notion of learner autonomy has attracted the close attention of scholars, teachers, policy makers and researchers in various countries. In Indonesia, while its scope remains limited, learner independence is one of the highlights of the current curriculum. The purpose of this study was threefold: to investigate how Indonesian secondary school…

In education, terms and concepts are extremely important in terms of description of a variety of facts and events. Concepts are considered the building stones of knowledge. Concepts are important in teaching Social Studies that aims to provide the basic citizenship skills, and in teaching the subjects contained within the Social Studies course.…

Explores how students' epistemological ideas about the nature of science interact with their conceptual understanding of a particular domain as reflected in written explanations for an event of natural selection constructed by groups of high school students through a technology-supported curriculum on evolution. Highlights the need for an…

Children's learning of consumer economics concepts in two types of preschool teaching conditions was compared. Children in the Ausubelian program (high proportion of teacher-directed learning activities) achieved a significantly higher level of performance than did children in the Piagetian program (high proportion of child-directed activities.)…

Findings from two studies of fourth grade children learning the concept of mathematical equivalence are presented. The questions studied were: (1) Can knowledge conveyed in gesture but not in speech be tapped by a recognition technique; and (2) Does having implicit knowledge that is expressed in gesture but not in speech have implications for…

A group of 105 lower-lower middle class kindergarten children were tested on a set of single variable classification tasks and related-component tasks dealing with color and number. Children who failed to reach criterion on the classification test were randomly assigned to one of five experimental groups, stratified on the basis of performance on…

A study at a South African university investigated the mathematical reasoning ability of 314 first-year chemistry students and 69 mathematics students regarding ratios and proportions in non-chemistry-related problems. Results indicated students' mathematical readiness in these areas was only weakly linked to their previous achievement in…

Two studies explored the possibility of inducing conservation understanding in intellectually normal preschoolers and mildly mentally retarded children of comparable mental age. Retarded children, MA 3-10 to 5-0, received Verbal Rule instruction. Three- and 4-year-old children were given Verbal Rule training in a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design…

In order to understand how learning occurs in children from different cultures, the learning profiles of Japanese and American children who ranged in age from 4 to 6 was examined, using the Iowa Early Learning Assessment Instrument (IELA). After the English instructions of the IELA were translated into Japanese the IELA was sent to Japan and was…

The development of economic reasoning in young children is examined from the theoretical perspective of Piaget's work on cognitive development. To determine a possible correlation between grade level and the type of reasoning children use to approach economic problems, 70 urban children, preschool through grade 3, answered questions which measured…

This is the final report of the project entitled "A Study to Determine the Degree of Relationship between Linguistic Concepts and Structures in French as a Mother Tongue and Stages of Psychological Readiness of Students at the Junior and Intermediate Levels." The project's primary aim was to determine the psychological readiness, with…