David Orr's classic article links education to living in the outdoors and studying all disciplines through the unifying lens of place. Pedagogy of place counters abstraction, it is the natural world embodying principles of learning that involve direct observation, investigation, experimentation, and manual skills. Place is the laboratory providing…

Reports a retraction of "Hierarchical encoding of behavior: Translating perception into action" by Bridgette Martin Hard, Sandra C. Lozano and Barbara Tversky (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2006[Nov], Vol 135[4], 588-608). All authors retract this article. Co-author Tversky and co-author Hard believe that the research results cannot…

Over the past half century the mass media, including video games, have become important socializers of children. Observational learning theory has evolved into social-cognitive information processing models that explain that what a child observes in any venue has both short-term and long-term influences on the child's behaviors and cognitions. C.…

Yoshida and Smith (this issue) provide one of the first attempts to overcome the most serious impediment to the use of head-mounted eye trackers with infants: Except in rare cases they are not light enough to be worn on an infant's head, or the infant does not tolerate looking through a half-silvered mirror that is hanging on a rigid stalk…

Teacher-educator and researcher Daniel L. Kohut suggests in "Musical Performance: Learning Theory and Pedagogy" that there are many problems that result from the way music teachers often teach. Most teachers focus on the process, not the goal. The Natural Learning Process that Kohut advocates is the same process that young children use when they…

The authors argue that imitation is a flexible and adaptive learning mechanism in that children do not always reproduce all of the details they can from a demonstration. Instead, they vary their replications depending on their interpretation of the situation. Specifically, the authors propose that when children do not understand the overall reason…

Illustrates techniques for the development of thinking skills, using the processes of observation, recall, information processing, and concluding. (SK)

Attempts to define and clarify the concept of response uncertainty of the observer in imitation through a review of research on imitation. (CM)

Suggests several factors to account for the onset of infant-adult joint attention initiated by the infant, and identifies several consequences of infants' understanding of others as intentional subjects, such as verbal development and infants' role in their own enculturation. Contends that infants learn referential gestures not only by imitation…

Describes a formalized library media specialist mentoring program in the Iowa City Community School District. Discussion includes characteristics for successful mentoring; the role of mentors; benefits for mentors, proteges, and library media programs; and the evolution of the mentoring relationship. (AEF)

The effectiveness of students' modeling teacher behaviors as a means of bringing about desirable classroom decorum and skill achievement is discussed within the context of physical education classes. (JD)

Discusses the importance of considering theory to be rooted in observation and suggests that no observation stops with itself but instead yields another observation. Suggests that what must occur is that teachers become prepared to observe their observations: to look and look again. (MG)

Discusses those persons (interdisciplinary professors and researchers) who served as models for the author's teaching/research and their specific contributions to his experience. (AEW)

Current beliefs about how children draw emphasize the importance of drawing from memory, rather than from observation. However, an experiment with children aged seven to nine showed that observation drawings included greater detail and complexity. More research on observation drawing is recommended. (IS)

Drawing on anthropological theories of cultural transmission, the author suggests that the simple notion of teacher education be replaced with a concept incorporating teacher education (instruction in formal procedures), teacher enculturation (role-learning through observation), and teacher schooling (transmission of professional folklore which…