This article reports on the value of using student-generated analogies with undergraduate science students as a strategy for promoting conceptual understanding. A quantitative study was undertaken involving students in four sections of an introductory chemistry course for prospective science majors attending a four year college in British…

This study used structured analogue situations to examine factors that might influence teachers' preferences and opinions about language interventions. These factors included respondent groups (preschool vs. elementary school teachers), type of treatment approach (naturalistic vs. therapeutic), person delivering the intervention (classroom teacher…

We present three studies in mobile learning. First, we polled 333 Japanese university students regarding their use of mobile devices. One hundred percent reported owning a mobile phone. Ninety-nine percent send e-mail on their mobile phones, exchanging some 200 e-mail messages each week. Sixty-six percent e-mail peers about classes; 44% e-mail for…

The Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument-Preservice (STEBI-B) has been used in many studies to measure science teaching self-efficacy and outcome expectancy in preservice elementary teachers. Since its development in 1990, there have been no studies that have re-examined its internal validity and reliability. The purpose of this study was…

This study investigates the cultural nature of teaching. It compares a sample of 39 videotaped Italian mathematics lessons to German, Japanese, and U.S. lessons videotaped in TIMSS. This study expands on earlier work that was based on a smaller sample; analysis is also extended to the nature of the mathematical content presented. The results…

This study investigated the ways in which beliefs about the nature of the science vary as a function of an individual's chemistry expertise and chemistry research experience across the range from high-schools students, whose exposure to chemistry occurs in the classroom, to practicing research chemists. Interviews conducted with a total of 91…

Second-grade students were divided into groups subjected to three programs namely, Direct Instruction, Open Court and literature based program, in order to determine the effectiveness of the three programs. The results indicated that the Open Court and Direct Instruction programs did not improve the children's reading.

The objectives of this study were to generate precise estimates of suicide rates in the military while controlling for factors contributing to rate variability such as demographic differences and classification bias, and to develop a simple methodology for the determination of statistically derived thresholds for detecting significant rate…

Gerald Bracey has been dismayed at the uncritical acceptance of international comparisons in this country. It seems to him that otherwise competent researchers and psychometricians abandon all critical facilities when dealing with data from the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement--the TIMSS studies and PIRLS--or…

Preservice and experienced teachers (N = 58, from 7 universities) wrote lesson plans for a hypothetical beginning band lesson, using one page from a band method book as source material. Lesson plans were analyzed for word count, level of detail, and for strategies that appeared most frequently. Experienced teachers used fewer words than…

Mastering sentence-construction skills is essential to learning to write. Limited sentence-construction skills may hinder a writer's ability to translate ideas into text. It may also inhibit or interfere with other composing processes, as developing writers must devote considerable cognitive effort to sentence construction. The authors examined…

This paper reports on an analysis of the assessment principles used in marking students' written texts in the UK. It considers the assessment advice offered markers with respect to two stories written by 14 year old students in the Key Stage 3 English test in England. The observations offered on the written texts are shown to be general and…

Originality is a necessary part of creativity, but creative things are more than just original. They also solve a problem, or more generally are somehow fitting or appropriate. Yet previous research found an inverse relationship between ratings of originality and ratings of appropriateness. The present investigation employed a different…

This study compared the pedagogical content knowledge of mathematics in U.S. and Chinese middle schools. The results of this comparative study indicated that mathematics teachers' pedagogical content knowledge in the two countries differs markedly, which has a deep impact on teaching practice. The Chinese teachers emphasized developing procedural…

A group of experienced secondary school teachers used a novel learning theory as a resource for planning and carrying out their teaching of a difficult economic concept. Their students' mastery of this concept after a series of three lessons was compared with the mastery of the same concept by students who were taught by another group of teachers…