In on-demand education, students often experience problems with directing their own learning processes. A Structured Task Evaluation and Planning Portfolio (STEPP) was designed to help students develop 3 basic self-directed learning skills: Assessing the quality of own performance, formulating learning needs, and selecting future learning tasks. A…

Considers ways to successfully create an online community. Suggests that one way to engage students and encourage them to want to take responsibility and ownership for their learning is to construct a learning environment that places their ideas at the center of the learning process, not the completion of the course assignments. (SG)

The article describes five diverse secondary schools with successful programs to provide responsive instruction based on individual learning styles. Schools include a school for gifted students in Minnesota, a middle school in New Jersey, and three schools in New York. (DB)

Describes an approach to teaching complex models in science that uses a model construction cycle of generation, evaluation, and modification. Reports on a case study of a student in a tutoring experiment in the study of electric circuits. Focuses on the role of analogies, discrepant events, and the student's moments of surprise as motivators of…

Provides a rationale for the use of graphic organizers (GOs), traces their history and development, reviews 16 studies that have used GOs as text adjuncts, and discusses limitations that have made GO research nonsystematic. Suggests future research should examine and answer how GOs can be constructed for classroom use. (PA)

Specific combinations of educational and ICT conditions including computer use may optimise learning processes, particularly for learners at risk. This position paper asks which curricular, instructional, and ICT characteristics can be expected to optimise learning processes and outcomes, and how to best achieve this optimization. A theoretical…

One key issue at the heart of conducting classroom discussions is why teachers are attempting to initiate a discussion and what they can do to initiate effective classroom discussions. This paper considers this issue. The paper first considers two classroom discussions which revolve around a short story, "Only Clowns Passing Through" (Jeanne A.…

During the year 2000, 1,737 students were randomly selected to represent 231,000 students participating in 1,350 JROTC programs in three regions of the United States. The intention of this study was to identify whether a dominant learning style preference would be revealed for this student population as compared to the learning style of the…

The number of video examples of a concept and the dispersion of the examples were studied as variables affecting concept learning by 50 Dutch 12-year-old and 14-year-old secondary students. Although the number had no effect, broadly dispersed examples improved posttest classification ability. Implications for concept teaching are discussed. (SLD)

This study was designed to explore students perceptions of how a change in pedagogy influenced learning. The study was undertaken as part of a professional development residency in which a teacher educator worked with the staff of a high school science faculty in an on-site professional development program focusing on classroom teaching and…

Discusses the need to consider the cognitive models of students and their learning processes when designing computer tutorials, and describes a tutorial designed to teach students how to generate algebraic equations for story problems. Testing and revisions of the tutorial, with both college and high school students are described. (14 references)…

Defines some of the minimal conditions for effective instruction in reasoning and rhetoric. Argues that instructors must take account of the learner, pay regard to the cultural embeddedness of knowledge and the means by which that knowledge is assessed and transmitted. (PRA)

This study compared the effectiveness of teaching multidigit addition of whole numbers without regrouping prior to teaching it with regrouping to teaching multidigit addition with and without regrouping simultaneously. Pretest/posttest-delayed posttest results of second grade students (n=151) from seven randomly assigned classrooms indicated no…

The assertion that "higher order" thinking skills can be improved by learning to program computers is not a new one. The idea endures even though the empirical evidence over the years has been mixed at best. In fact, there is no reason to expect that all programming courses will have identical, or even similar, effects. Such courses typically…

This booklet discusses the importance to adolescents and adults with mental retardation of learning how to respond correctly to the many variations in home, work, and community activities in order to be successful in integrated settings. The difficulties individuals with mental retardation have in generalizing skills learned in one situation to a…