This book examines the rhetoric surrounding the notion of informal learning in order to expand debate about the uses of informal learning in workplaces and about attempts to "recognize" it through competency-based standards. The following topics are among those discussed in the book's eight chapters: (1) the nature of informal learning…

This study sought to determine: (1) what children understand about "chance" when they begin secondary school?; and (2) how common and how influential the use of informal heuristics, approaches, and biases is in their thinking about probability in the school context. Children's understanding of chance, attributions of events to…

A cognitive or internal representation refers to an organized system of information which reflects certain, but not all, of the information about reality being represented. This paper considers various opinions, controversies, and debates about what representation is, how it comes about, and what forms of representation can be distinguished. The…

How quickly can new staff members who come with minimal qualifcations in early childhood education be trained? Is there a way to develop a sense of history and community in child care programs, honoring diversity while documenting the learning process and engagement individuals have with each other? In an age of fast-paced electronic media and…

Education helps children select and progress toward appropriate goals. One of the impediments to education for American students is their lack of skill in English. Clear insight into the essentials of language comes from observing how the variables function in a model language such as Esperanto. Once children understand the basic anatomy of…

The pressure to get students to write effectively and to think critically, and the role that literature plays in this task, is a recurring issue in the history of English instruction. In part, this debate stems from contradictory philosophies of the goals of an introductory writing class held by both writing program administrators and composition…

A case study of the acquisition of Hausa as the first language by a child focuses on acquisition of interrogatives. The subject was a male child aged 25-60 months. Data were drawn from observation and elicitation. Three phases of acquisition were distinguished. Strategies adopted by the child appeared to reflect realities and contacts in his daily…

The research circle is a form of cooperation between trade unions and researchers that is spreading all over Sweden and beyond its national borders. The research circles described in this book were arranged jointly by SKAF (Swedish Municipal Workers' Union) and the Uppsala University Department of Education. A research circle is a study circle in…

Although English teachers have implicitly been aware of the functions of writing, they may not always have explored the ways writing can be used to enhance learning: learning of content, of skills, and of self. Arthur Applebee noted that English teachers were most likely to stress personal and imaginative experiences in their writing assignments,…

A longitudinal study investigated the development of children's writing over a 5-year period by examining how children use physical and symbolic representation systems that they have constructed to express meaning, how the meaning they intend is related to the social context and function of written language, and how this constructive process of…

This study examined the effects of episodic-mapping, traditional notetaking, and rereading on eighth-grade students' recall of historical text. Episodic-maps are a kind of notetaking procedure that requires students to represent ideas from a text in the form of a graphic diagram. As predicted, both episodic-mapping and traditional notetaking…

This book is intended to help teachers and college students promote more effective learning through development of critical thinking and reflective learning skills. Part 1 is about theory; it consists of five chapters, which include an overview of the book's themes as well as discussions of learning philosophies and models, learning theories, the…

This document contains four papers from a symposium on assessing the learning organization. "Measuring Organizational Learning: A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of an Organization Survey" (Jamie Callahan Fabian, Ralph O. Mueller, Dail L. Fields) compares two models for measuring four constructs inherent to Schwandt's model of…

Presenting the diagnostic teaching units for grades 7, 8, and 9 social studies, this handbook is intended to be used along with the companion handbook 1, "Evaluating Students' Learning and Communication Processes: Integrating Diagnostic Evaluation and Instruction." The student activities of the diagnostic teaching units in the handbook…

Though rooted in neo-Piagetian research, constructivism is an avenue of research that departed from the neo-Piagetian mainstream 20 years ago and has continued on a distinct path of development. For constructivists, learning is not knowledge written on, or transplanted to, a person's mind as if the mind were a blank slate waiting to be written on…