Presents recommendations for teachers and their instructors to help teachers master science courses. Comments for teachers include create a learning community, do not dread solving problems, think things through, and keep a positive attitude. Comments for instructors include think about who your students are, make your course learner-friendly, try…

This article provides an overview of how an emergent literacy perspective may serve as a framework for better understanding the reading and writing behaviors of young children with learning disabilities. Specific intervention techniques are given to help teachers provide rich, meaningful emergent literacy opportunities in the classroom. (Contains…

Examines how participation in learning resources activities and perceptions of the value of learning resources affects student teachers' self, task, and impact concerns. Subjects were 173 student teachers. Results revealed high self-concerns and higher impact concerns. Utilization of learning resources had a significant effect on task concerns,…

Suggests that prior to teaching reading skills all staff need to agree on a set of labels and determine how they will teach those skills in the classroom. Offers specific strategies for music and art teachers that can be used by any teacher. (NB)

Surveys of student studying an introductory science course at a distance indicated that they had very favorable attitudes to CD-ROM multimedia activities that are an integral part of the course teaching package. Research reported here focused on how students actually studied as they worked through the activities. Suggestions are made for future…

Presents activities for teaching two basic phonemic awareness tasks to young children who are learning to read. Oral blending exercises help children hear how sounds are put together to make words so they can begin sounding out words independently as they read. Oral segmentation activities help children separate words into sounds so they can build…

In this article, Marilyn Chapman provides educators and others interested in early literacy with important information about phonemic awareness to help them make decisions about what to do in their schools. She begins with an explanation of phonemic awareness and how it relates to other aspects of literacy development such as phonological…

Many young people live in communities with historically interesting buildings, and tours of those historical sites can reveal much about life in the past. Something that students often overlook in the analysis of historic sites is the civic values held by the people who lived there. The ideas of architecture cannot be divorced from the people or…

The study explores teachers' experiences of teaching a context-based chemistry course, "Salters Advanced Chemistry", as compared with teachers of a conventional course. Second, main factors that appear to influence decisions over whether or not to adopt context-based courses are investigated. Two hundred and twenty-two teachers' views of a…

This article describes an activity in which students plot collections of ordered pairs according to prescribed set conditions. The coordinate plane sets can have rich variety, and their construction fosters critical thinking, attention to detail, and algebraic reasoning. (Contains 3 figures.)

The framework of Tharp and Gallimore (1988) was adapted to form a ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) Model of Mathematical Proficiency that identifies two interacting kinds of learning activities: instructional conversations that assist understanding and practice that develops fluency. A Class Learning Path was conceptualized as a classroom path…

This article describes the use of commercial games in mathematics to help teach algebraic reasoning, spatial sense, and multistep problem solving. It also provides a description of how one teacher implemented the use of games.

This article aims to contribute to the theory of mathematics instruction by highlighting and analysing Leen Streefland's work as a teacher in a primary school. Core ideas of Streefland's are discussed as part of a recent wave of educational innovations using the idea of learning communities. I present a case study of a lesson co-taught by…

A study of the impact of a major recent language education reform project in Italy employed a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection methods, some of which could inform other studies of language learning and teaching. Impact study findings suggested interesting differences between the perceptions of learners and teachers on…

Kruse and Roehrig present a study designed to assess teacher's misconceptions as related to their background and refer to research showing that teaching science, as inquiry requires a "highly structured and deep conceptual knowledge base". Some of the methods that require strong conceptual knowledge include guided-inquiry laboratories, cooperative…