Classroom discussions represent a common learning activity for students in schools. The prevailing discourse has focused on how to encourage as many students as possible to participate actively in classroom discussions with the assumption that only vocal students are engaged learners. The present essay critically challenges this position by…

The article presents a research study that examined the ways in which digital curation promotes personalized learning, as well as the students' experiences of this learning process. The study was conducted in the context of K-12 education. Participants spent three months on a project that included curating a personalized digital collection. The…

This article introduces a descriptive conceptual framework to provide teachers with a means of recognizing and describing instructional activities that use primary sources. The framework provides structure for professional development programs that have been established to train teachers to access and integrate primary sources into lessons. The…

Web-based self-learning (WBSL) has received a lot of attention in recent years due to the vast amount of varied materials available in the Web 2.0 environment. However, this large amount of material also has resulted in a serious problem of cognitive overload that degrades the efficacy of learning. In this study, an information graphics method is…

This article demonstrates how a set of complementary qualitative methods can be used to construct a detailed picture not only of the nature of young people's representations of a distant place but the processes of learning by which such representations develop over the medium term. The analysis is based on an interpretive case study of a class of…

Consistency among the objectives, learning activities, and assessment exercises results in aligned courses, which give students direction and clarity and yield increased learning. However, instructors may not check for course alignment. This article describes a concrete way to determine course alignment by plotting the course components on a table…

The focus is on how reasoning can be developed through the study of two-dimensional shapes, their properties, and the relationships among them. Research on children's understanding of geometric shapes is reviewed and activities to develop analyzing and classifying skills are given, with a bibliography included. (MNS)

How strategies affect learning of categories that lack necessary and sufficient attributes is explored. The authors propose that strategy variations induced by instructions affect only the amount of information represented about attributes, not processes operating on representations. An experiment required subjects to classify schematic faces into…

A theoretical scheme classifies user behavior into three domains of library activity--affective, cognitive, and psychomotor--and three levels of learning--orientation, interaction, and internalization. Examples of library skills and errors in each of the nine major classes are given, and applications to library instruction are suggested.…

To enable college students to grapple with their own process of creating, students complete a project that involves collecting a variety of small objects, dividing the objects into two categories, telling a story using all the objects, describing their feelings about the categorization and story-telling activities, and writing about their creative…

As educators target the articulation between university lower-division language acquisition courses and upper-division literature courses, higher order thinking and awareness of cognitive processes become increasingly important tools in bridging the gap. This article discusses the theoretical underpinnings of this issue and demonstrates the design…

This curriculum program is intended to promote the development of primary grade children's ability to think. A number of learning activities or tasks are presented along with the teaching strategy to be used in implementing them. The first part of the book describes aspects of the teaching strategy, including selecting activities, preparing for…

The document describes a practicum which developed a unit on critical thinking that applied Jerome Bruner's discovery-learning method and also incorporated the unit within the curricular requirements of elementary education majors at Castleton State College in Vermont. It is presented in five sections and an appendix. Section I provides…

Evaluation techniques were designed to improve learner performance through use of pre-specified popular instructional objectives. Current curriculum planning and evaluation practices are examined. Two common evaluation malpractices are: (1) the tendency to treat the content of the program as the most important criterion for evaluation, (2) the…

Variation is a key concept in the study of statistics and its understanding is a crucial aspect of most statistically related tasks. This study aimed to extend and apply a hierarchy for describing students' understanding of variation that was developed in a sampling context to the context of a natural event in which variation occurs. Students aged…