The "back to basics" movement has mistakenly pushed drama to the periphery of the school program. Direct communication of verifiable facts, once again so valued, actually militates against the personal creation of meaning. Always subjective, meaning develops through individuals' active encounters with events or situations--never through…

In an attempt to solve the problems of measuring attitude change, a dynamic testing procedure was developed that appears to be applicable to the fields of adult education, attitude theory research, and clinical counseling. This monograph, developed in a particular field of adult education (farm management), argues that, when people are able to…

Concept mapping typically refers to the graphic representation of concepts and their interrelationships. In this instance, concept mapping is used as a means for assessing an individual's conceptual understanding of a curricular topic. In a series of studies with teacher trainees, emphasis was on determining whether concept maps have regular…

This report concerns the dilemma faced by students enrolled in Quebec's Colleges de l'Enseignement General and Professional and by students everywhere as more and more emphasis is placed on the content of learning rather than on learning how to learn. The construct of educational-life skills is introduced and a taxonomy of feedback materials is…

A study examined the phoneme-grapheme correspondence in native English-speaking kindergartners' spelling and compared it to the results of similar research with Spanish-speaking children. It tested the hypothesis that English-speaking children make their first grapheme-sound correspondences differently because of phonological differences in the…

The qualities and characteristics of excellent faculty at Miami-Dade Community College (MDCC) are described in this paper. First, an underlying set of assumptions is presented, stressing that the qualities identified as representative of faculty excellence apply equally to classroom teachers, librarians, counselors, and other non-teaching faculty,…

This document contains reports and papers from a conference focusing on the political dimension of mathematics education. The program was organized around four large themes: (1) "Mathematics Education and Culture" based on 13 papers; (2) "Society and Institutionalized Mathematics Education" based on 41 papers; (3) "Educational Institutions and the…

A study focused on teaching students to write effectively in time-pressure situations, particularly on essay exams. Thirteen sections of freshman composition (205 students) were divided into two treatment groups. Half of the classes completed the exam-taking unit in a standard freshman text. The other half of the classes worked through an inquiry…

The design of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) in a knowledge domain where expertise is modeled as a set of uncertain and incomplete beliefs that are justifiable and expressible in the form of a critical argument is outlined. Issues concerning knowledge communication in a tutorial interaction are discussed with reference to a cognitive model…

In three parts, this symposium presentation to the American Montessori Society: (1) comments generally on current perceptions of Montessori education; (2) poses questions about practices in Montessori classrooms that challenge Montessori educators' core beliefs about Montessori education; and (3) discusses the cutting edges of contemporary…

This paper presents a conceptual framework that relates empirical aspects of student teaching (facts about the experience) to considerations of value (what student teachers ought to learn). First, the report explains what is meant by calling student teaching an "occasion for teacher learning." Next, based on observational and interview…

Noting that the claim that writing is a way to learn underlies most writing across the curriculum programs, this paper provides an overview of recent research results supporting the claim and emphasizes the need for more research in this area. The paper first identifies three dominant interpretations in the writing across the curriculum…

An extension of an earlier longitudinal study of thriving, average, or non-thriving kindergarten children, this study examined the intellectual, academic, social, self-directive, and temperamental characteristics of children from kindergarten to grade four. Fifty-four of the children were perceived by their junior or senior kindergarten teachers…

Script theory suggests that human memory is organized around personal experiences or episodes rather than around semantic categories, and that a particular event is remembered as it relates to other events occurring simultaneously. According to the experience of one teacher of business German on the college level, students of business German need…

Descriptions of major activities for each of the seven Urban Mathematics Collaborative Projects sponsored by the Ford Foundation are contained in this report. These include: (1) Cleveland Collaborative for Mathematics Education; (2) Los Angeles Collaborative: Professional Links with Urban Schools; (3) Philadelphia Urban Mathematics Collaborative;…