This study aims to develop primary-school students' understanding of the scientific practices in the Benzene Ring Heuristic (BRH) and to determine how BRH applications would affect student perceptions about science, scientific knowledge, and scientists. An interpretative qualitative research design was used in the study. The study group consisted…

Forty 4th and 9th grade students participated individually in tutorial interviews centered on a problem-solving activity designed for learning basic algebra mechanics through diagrammatic modeling of an engaging narrative about a buccaneering giant burying and unearthing her treasure on a desert island. Participants were randomly assigned to…

In the era of contemporary society, which revolves around the fast information science revolution, the pupil is no longer just an observer in the educational process but rather an active constructor of one's own knowledge. Current didactic theories proclaim teaching, in which the teacher is an instructor and a facilitator, and as such should…

Mathematics education practitioners and researchers have long debated best pedagogical practices for introducing new concepts. Our design-based research project evaluated a heuristic framework, whereby students first develop acontextual sensorimotor schemes and only then extend these schemes to incorporate both concrete narratives (grounding) and…

The article focuses on pedagogical practices of recognition and esteem (Wertschatzung) and on the question of how those practices can be appropriately studied and epistemologically grasped. The investigation involves an inner-city elementary school in a socio-economically problematic district. With regard to the communication forms in this…

A previous study with adults [Koriat, A. (2008a). "Easy comes, easy goes? The link between learning and remembering and its exploitation in metacognition." "Memory & Cognition," 36, 416-428] established a correlation between learning and remembering: items requiring more trials to acquisition (TTA) were less likely to be recalled than those…

Radical constructivists advocate discovery-based pedagogical regimes that enable students to incrementally and continuously adapt their cognitive structures to the instrumented cultural environment. Some sociocultural theorists, however, maintain that learning implies discontinuity in conceptual development, because novices must appropriate expert…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 requires public schools in the United States to test students in grades 3-8. The author argues that this mandate has been supported by the public, in part, because of the "availability heuristic," a phenomenon which occurs when people assess the probability of an event by the ease with which instances…

This heuristic narratological inquiry used video-taped interviews and observations to explore the experiences of 145 urban students in grades one through six who also represented diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The goal of the study was to identify curricular and pedagogical strategies that enhance what students love about school,…

This study examines four months of online discourse of 22 Grade 4 students engaged in efforts to advance their understanding of optics. Their work is part of a school-wide knowledge building initiative, the essence of which is giving students collective responsibility for idea improvement. This goal is supported by software--Knowledge…

This paper reports on the mathematical modelling of four classes of 4th-grade children as they worked on a modelling problem involving the selection of an Australian swimming team for the 2004 Olympics. The problem was implemented during the second year of the children's participation in a 3-year longitudinal program of modelling experiences…

Very few elementary public school teachers in the United States expose their students to religion and spirituality in an in-depth way. Even when they have the necessary knowledge base, they shy away from so dangerous an enterprise. They might fear provoking a challenge from parents who are irreligious and are shocked to find religion being…

In this article, the authors would like to look at a range of solutions submitted by Year 4-5 teams in the 2003 "Naturally Mathematical Challenge" to a question that involves no more than the numbers 1 to 6 and possible arrangements of them. In the context of other competition questions and in their elaboration of mathematical process,…