This article argues that SoTL may draw on and inform other scholarships--of discovery, application and integration--by bringing them into a classroom- and community-based scholarship of communal inquiry. In so doing, SoTL will resist teaching being regarded and evaluated as transmission and delivery of knowledge made elsewhere, reasserting the…

Learning theories are essential for effective teaching in that they shed light on different aspects of the learning process. The spectrum of learning theories can be categorized into three main areas: behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. "Behaviorism" as a teacher-centered instructional framework for a long time dominated educational…

Critical pedagogy is a by product of postmodernism, which argues that reality is always subjective, and truth is identified through each person's experiences and environment. Can critical pedagogy be applied to faith-based education? The authors claim that it can. First, the theories and practices of critical pedagogy have strengthened faith-based…

Personal epistemological beliefs, one's beliefs about the nature and acquisition of knowledge, and their role in the learning process have become a focus of a growing body of research in recent years. Studies show that a person's epistemological beliefs play an important role in their intellectual development as well as in learning specific…

Tangible technologies and shared interfaces create new paradigms for mediating collaboration through dynamic, synchronous environments, where action is as important as speech for participating and contributing to the activity. However, interaction with shared interfaces has been shown to be inherently susceptible to peer interference, potentially…

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…

At the beginning of my academic journey I held the belief that I would learn to teach simply by teaching. To my dismay, I had underestimated the complicated nature of teaching in higher education and gave little consideration to the ways students learn. Feeling overwhelmed by my situation, I began questioning my teaching practices and student…

In order to better understand how to design hands-on child-computer interaction, we explore how different styles of interaction facilitate children's thinking while they use their hands to manipulate objects. We present an exploratory study of children solving a spatial puzzle task. We investigate how the affordances of physical, graphical…

Although teachers in principle are prepared to make use of science centers, such excursions often fail to facilitate learning processes. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the link between science centers and schools. The design and evaluation of valuable outreach projects may enhance students' out-of-school science learning. In our study, we…

The learning cycle is a way to structure inquiry in school science and occurs in several sequential phases. A learning cycle moves children through a scientific investigation by having them first explore materials, then construct a concept, and finally apply or extend the concept to other situations. Why the learning cycle? Because it is a…

We present a study on the effect of instruction on collaboration in a collaborative discovery learning environment. The instruction we used, called RIDE, is built upon four principles identified in the literature on collaborative processes: Respect, Intelligent collaboration, Deciding together, and Encouraging. In an experimental study, a group of…

In this study, we investigated the influence of individual learners' motivation on the collaborative discovery learning process. In this we distinguished the motivation of the individual learners and had eye for the composition of groups, which could be homogeneous or heterogeneous in terms of motivation. The study involved 73 dyads of 10th-grade…

The purpose of this study was to explore upper elementary reading classes in a low socio-economic area to determine the effects frequent praise, both academically and socially, have on the zone of proximal development in reading (ZPD[subscript RL], Renaissance Learning, 2006). A causal-comparative study was utilized by observing two groups of…

An analysis of many definitions of discovery and a discourse on a new synthesis of these definitions. (HB)

Inductive teaching methods are a form of discovery for generalities but are uneconomical and hard to warrant for the conveyance of facts. (MM)