Radical constructivists advocate discovery-based pedagogical regimes that enable students to incrementally and continuously adapt their cognitive structures to the instrumented cultural environment. Some sociocultural theorists, however, maintain that learning implies discontinuity in conceptual development, because novices must appropriate expert…

The effects of the availability of behaviorally stated objectives on the learning process were studied. It was hypothesized that objectives would serve as orienting stimuli which would help students to attend to, process, and organize relevant aspects of displayed information in accordance with stated objectives. Therefore, the presentation of…

This paper contains the results of a study on the importance of discovery learning using computer simulations. The purpose of the study was to identify what constitutes discovery learning and to assess the effects of instructional support measures. College students were observed working with an assignment and a computer simulation in the domain of…

The major results and conclusions of a program of research concerned primarily with the relationship of cognitive abilities to learning are summarized. The major purpose of this research was to develop theorems of instruction related to the interaction of task variables and individual difference variables and to develop them in a manner relevant…

This study was designed to determine students' abilities and difficulties in articulating the relationship between function and derivative. High-school students were presented 15 problems during two 75-minute interviews in which they were asked to construct functions experimentally in three different contexts: motion, fluids, and number-change. In…