Modern agriculture poses ecological problems and opportunities, which defy simple democratic reform without an educated citizenry. Developing an educated citizenry can be accomplished by further developing agricultural literacy in elementary education. While benchmarks for agricultural literacy have been produced, relatively little attention has…

This study addressed one aspect of scientific reasoning, the control of variables reasoning scheme. We explored whether a short intervention aimed at accelerating this reasoning scheme by CASE lessons would improve students' ability to apply this scheme in problems related to the biology curriculum. About 120 students from grade nine were assessed…

James Mark Baldwin is one of the most important and least known early American scientific psychologists. Drawing inspiration from Charles Darwin and other evolutionists of the period, Baldwin developed a biosocial theory of psychological development that influenced both Jean Piaget and Lev S. Vygotsky; and he proposed a mechanism relating learned…

In 1927, nursery school educator Lucy Sprague Mitchell heralded Jean Piaget's psychology as of "outstanding interest" and wrote in "Progressive Education" that it should be of "immense service" to psychologists, teachers, and parents. In 1929, psychologist Lois Meek praised Piaget's research in the National Society for the Study of Education's…

This study was an investigation of mathematics instruction and professional development at a rural elementary school. The Department of Education in a southern U.S. state implemented a new curriculum in 2007 that required major changes in mathematics instruction. The problems were that teachers engaged in different levels of training and many…

Animism (erroneously believing inanimate objects are alive) is present in older adults (McDonald & Stuart-Hamilton, 2000). However, it is unclear if animism arises in later life or middle age. The current study tested 34 middle-aged adults (mean age 48 years) on Piaget's animism task and found a significant level of animism. Strength of…

Constructivism has constituted a predominant philosophical trend in mathematics education, but its implementation in the classroom has proven to be "far more difficult than the reform community acknowledges". This difficulty may be due in part to administrative cultures that might insist on more procedural types of instruction aimed at testing, in…

Certainly not as many who have heard the names of Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, and Lev Vygotsky, have heard of Sabina Spielrein. While Spielrein had numerous face-to-face encounters, some personal and some professional, with all four men, and the accounting of her life and the interactions she had with them has been the content of…

An 18-item, multiple choice, 2-tiered instrument designed to measure understanding of the learning cycle (ULC) was developed and field-tested from the learning cycle test (LCT) of Odom and Settlage ("Journal of Science Teacher Education, 7", 123-142, 1996). All question sets of the LCT were modified to some degree and 5 new sets were…

The garlic problem presented in this article develops several themes related to dimensional analysis and also introduces students to a few basic statistical ideas. This garlic problem was used in a university preparatory chemistry class, designed for students with no chemistry background. However, this course is unique because one of the primary…

In spite of numerous HIV/AIDS-prevention education efforts, the HIV infection rates in sub-Saharan Africa remain high. Exploring and understanding the reasons behind these infection rates is imperative in a bid to offer life skills and moral education that address the root causes of the pandemic. In a recent study concerning effective…

In a 3-year longitudinal study, 471 children were classified, based on their performances on arithmetic tests in first and second grade, as having persistent arithmetic disabilities (AD), persistent low achieving (LA), persistent typical achieving, inconsistent arithmetic disabilities (DF1), or inconsistent low achieving in arithmetic. Significant…

This article addresses the learning paradox, which obliges researchers to explain how cognition can advance from a lower level of reasoning to a higher one. Although the question is at least as old as Plato, two major flaws have inhibited progress in developing solutions: the assumption that learning is an inductive process, and the conflation of…

In his last book, "Toward a Logic of Meanings" (Piaget & Garcia, 1991), Jean Piaget describes how thought can be categorized into a form of propositional logic, a logic of meanings. The intent of this article is to offer this analysis by Piaget as a means to understand the language and teaching of science. Using binary propositions, conjunctions,…

There are many meanings of "scientific reasoning" or "scientific inquiry" in use, and many corresponding orientations toward its enhancement and tracking. Deciding what these terms mean once and for all is an elusive and likely chimerical goal. However, setting down some core models might help in being clear on where different researchers stand…