To help educators create electronic communities, the U.S. Department of Education sponsors Challenge Grants for Technology in Education, designed to stimulate local innovations in using learning technologies. Presently, 43 districts are receiving substantial five-year grants. Partnerships involving schools, hardware manufacturers, software…

The strongly positivist beliefs on which traditional conceptions of instructional design (ID) are based derive from Aristotelian logic and oversimplify the world, reducing human learning and performance to a repertoire of manipulable behaviors. Reviews the cases against deterministic predictability and discusses hermeneutic, fuzzy logic, and chaos…

This review of the study of analogy in modern cognitive science sets the stage for three articles that follow to illustrate some current research and theories on analogy use. Analogy is a powerful cognitive mechanism that people use to make inferences and learn new abstractions. (SLD)

Explores the Competency Tripod model and flow diagrams as two sources for enabling students' metacognition in a second year undergraduate chemistry laboratory. Results indicate that all four students engaged in metacognitive practices, all believed that flow diagrams are extremely useful, and all understood the Competency Tripod model, but only…

Conceptions of learning and approaches to learning within vocational education were studied with 30 Finnish students of automotive mechanics. About half the students took a quantitative view of learning and favored a surface approach. Encouraging a qualitative view of learning and deeper approaches in vocational education is discussed. (SLD)

Advances a broad compatibility thesis that asserts that research activity can and does serve as an important mode of teaching and a valuable means of learning at the undergraduate and graduate level. Instead of a dichotomous distinction between research and teaching, it distinguishes types of institutions and educational levels in which research,…

Uses Karl Popper's theory that knowledge is produced through continual trial conjectures and error elimination to argue that students are fallible creators of knowledge and that the primary role of the teacher is as a critic. (EV)

Documents the use of student-generated questions as diagnostic of their willingness to engage in classroom interactions. Explores four ways of gathering students' written questions and their relative effectiveness. Examines students' capacity to design and present 'quality questions' and the extent to which these questions are indicative of…

Considers the concept that education and learning are physiological events worthy of classification within the health and wellness movement of health care. Discusses the meaning and purpose of education; education in transition; the need for a new paradigm; learning and health, including Alzheimer's disease; and language development and the…

The appropriateness of the metaphor of the purity of data is questioned, using a perspective based on L. S. Vygotsky's idea of the zone of proximal development and its emphasis on a genetic method in which development is mediated by cultural tools and signs. (SLD)

A simulation study compares nonhierarchical clustering capabilities of a class of neural networks using Kohonen learning with a K-means clustering procedure. The focus is on the ability of the procedures to recover correctly the known cluster structure in the data. Advantages and disadvantages of the procedures are reviewed. (SLD)

The extent to which the expectancy of a teaching demand influences learning results was studied with 36 education majors who learned from worked-out examples with or without the expectation that they would have to teach similar examples. Teaching expectancy decreased the superficiality of studying the worked-out examples. (SLD)

Three experiments involving 218 college students demonstrated that both labeling and visually isolating a set of steps in examples independently help students learn a subgoal and makes them more likely to solve novel problems that involve that subgoal although they require different steps to achieve it. (SLD)

In three experiments, 172 college students repeatedly read and recalled stories presented in good and poor form to determine whether the memory-enhancing effect of good text organization is transitory or long-lasting and whether it pertains to forgetting as well as learning. Advantages of good form are discussed. (SLD)