Summarizes some of the approaches to help personalize instruction and create a motivational learning environment in introductory biology courses. Suggestions for motivation include making the content meaningful, making yourself available, demonstrating that you care about students, creating student-oriented course features, and generating…

Questions how secondary school students view science models. Concludes by recommending that teachers mold scientific modeling to their students, encourage the use of multiple models in science lessons, progressively introduce sophisticated models, systematically present in-class models using the Focus, Action, and Reflection (FAR) guide, and…

Reviews the role of modeling in science teaching and learning. Investigates the knowledge and skills that science teachers think are needed to produce a model successfully using input from (n=39) Brazilian serving science teachers. (Contains 64 references.) (Author/YDS)

Argues that formal liberal education is being replaced, in high-risk sites like Ontario, by policies mandating teaching and learning activities that are aimed at serving the utilitarian needs of a corporate and globalized market place. Believes that "critical literacy" and "critical language awareness" offer Ontario education…

Summarizes findings from the National Study of Student Learning (NSSL), including findings that challenge conventional wisdom and findings that, in part, support it. Considers the findings' implications for faculty and administrators. Includes sidebars describing the design and conduct of the NSSL and listing other publications addressing NSSL…

Examines a theoretical perspective on the ways in which children progress in learning mathematics. Suggests that there is difficulty in associating teaching discourses with the mathematics they locate that can result in an incommensurability between alternative perspectives being offered. Resists attempts to privilege any particular account but…

Investigates children's knowledge about animals by examining the mental models they reveal through their talk when they see animal representations. Presents a study in which representations were provided by robotic models in a museum, preserved animals in a museum, and preserved animals borrowed from a museum and presented in a school setting.…

Explores insights that may be provided by a situated perspective on learning. Considers the ways in which a focus on the classroom community and the behaviors and practices implicit within such communities may increase understanding of students' mathematical knowledge production and use. (Contains 22 references.) (Author/ASK)

Presents information on prenatal brain development, detailing the functions controlled by the medulla, pons, and midbrain, and the implications for cognitive development. Concludes that fetal cognitive motor activity, including auditory discrimination, orienting, the wake-sleep cycle, fetal heart rate accelerations, and defensive reactions,…

Pulls together research on the nature of higher education teaching and learning across the different disciplines. Provides scope for future macro, meso, and micro level studies to seek explanations for systematic disciplinary differences. Suggests how this research can be used to inform institutional and government policy. (Contains 52…

Discusses Dewey's vision of the scientific mind and analyzes the stereotype of scientific thinking. Explains Dewey's notion of experience and clarifies the difference between ordinary experience and a Deweyan experience. (Contains 27 references.) (YDS)

Conducted a phenomenographic analysis of the conceptions of teaching and learning held by 16 secondary school teachers in 2 Australian schools. Identifies four categories derived from pooled data of the ways in which these teachers thought about teaching and learning, their teaching strategies, and their focus on student or content. (SLD)

Reports on teacher candidates' interviews of children to learn about students' everyday science understandings. Concludes that teachers must go through a process of asking, leading, interacting, and guiding in order to facilitate student learning. (MM)

Investigates the question, Can the mathematics students are taught be cast in such a form that it can be apprehended with the abilities they have and if so, how? Focuses on the language of student abilities, the nature of abilities, and individual differences. (MM)

What is it to learn for an unknown future? It might be said that the future has always been unknown but our opening question surely takes on a new pedagogical challenge if not urgency in the contemporary age. Indeed, it could be said that our opening question has never been generally acknowledged to be a significant motivating curricular and…