Student transition into higher education has increased in importance in recent times, with the growing trend in Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development nations towards universal higher education provision and the concomitant widening of participation to include previously under-represented groups. However, "transition" as a…

Creativity is one of the important skills of the twenty-first century and central to higher education (HE). When we look closer into research on creativity in HE, however, it is not clear how university teachers conceptualise student creativity. How do teachers grasp, observe and express student creativity? Different methods such as interviews and…

Studied the effect of exposure to principled changes in concept formation in four experiments involving 280 undergraduate and graduate students. Analyses reveal clear evidence of a transformational path with systematic training. Discusses implications for theories of similarity and categorization. Contains 83 references. (SLD)

Conducted among children of three different age levels, Experiment I tested the hypothesis that categorization ability is acquired in the following order: basic, superordinate, subordinate. Experiments II and III tested among adults the hypothesis that the greater the differentiation of categories at a given hierarchical level, the earlier…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) have experienced increasing pressures to provide accountability data and consumer information on the quality of teaching and learning. Existing ratings and rankings of HEIs tend to neglect information on student learning outcomes. Instead, they focus on inputs, activities and research outputs, such as resources…

A series of experiments investigating the processing of artificial set inclusion relations supports the view that many college students have the appropriate schema for processing inclusion relations, although it has not been elicited in previous artificial set-inclusion studies. (Author/PN)

Students prefer to classify creatures along the criteria of habitat and locomotion (method of movement). Discusses the educational consequences for biology instruction, particularly with regard to biological taxonomy, biodiversity, and evolution. (Contains 33 references.) (Author/YDS)

Analyzes verbal and figural student concept schemes for environmental issues through aspects of differentiation (number of categories employed), discrimination (range of phenomena involved), and integration (efficiency of organizing method). Results indicate students (N=28) use discrimination most and integration least and constructed…

States that the shift in meaning of the Periodic Table to represent regularities in the electron distribution in the shells of atoms can result in confusion between elements and atoms. (DDR)

In seven experiments, college or high school students studied texts containing either adjunct application or adjunct factual questions. Students were then tested for their ability to apply the presented concepts. Results suggested that the type of adjunct question had little influence on students' later ability to apply presented concepts.…

College students read two passages. Four groups answered questions requiring either a summary, a new example of the concept, a list of critical attributes of the concept, or identification of a new example. The "identify post-question group" showed the greatest accuracy in classifying new examples. (Author/MH)

A lexicalist, or direct-mapping, view of the relationship between syntactic functions and surface syntactic relations and a link between semantic features and the assignment of arguments to syntactic functions are advocated. An experiment with 192 undergraduate students examines the issues as problems of language production. (SLD)

Offers one example of a lecture that can build on personal research experience to demonstrate the ways in which attitudes of categories influence the focus, design, and outcomes of research projects. Provides some suggestions for further developing the lecture material in a post-lecture tutorial session and/or assignment. (CMK)

Areas of knowledge having impact upon teacher effectiveness include content knowledge, knowledge of the "human factor," and knowledge of "conceptualizing." An illustration of an instructional problem and how knowledge about conceptualizing is related to the problem is provided. (CJ)

Two implications of best-example theory for category acquisition were tested using a set of artificial concrete object categories. Categories acquired from initial exposure to good exemplars were learned more easily and accurately. People learn the best exemplars are category members before learning the poor exemplars are category members.…