Currently, there is a focus in science education on preparing students for lives as innovative and resilient citizens of the twenty-first century. Key to this is providing students with opportunities, mainly through inquiry processes, for discovery making and developing their creative reasoning by bringing school science closer to authentic…

This paper contributes to the expanding body of research on Playful Learning (PL) within Higher Education (HE), offering an in-depth examination of narratives concerning student participation and engagement in PL emerging as educators reflect on their experiences with PL in Danish teacher education and social education. In attempt to nuance and…

The landscape in which music is experienced in the 21st century has dramatically changed and scholarship in music education calls for classrooms in which teaching and learning are responsive to the new challenges. Furthermore, within the broader concerns of the place of the arts in the curriculum, the literature calls for empirical evidences…

The current study examined the impact of experiencing either a guided play or direct instruction learning environment on causal learning, curiosity, and divergent thinking. Forty-three children (age 4- to 6-years) participated in an online experiment in which they completed a causal learning task in either guided play or direct instruction…

Hong Kong's policy and curriculum guide advocates the development of creativity, and stresses the importance of child-centred and play-based practices in preschools. Effective pedagogical approaches for creativity reform should reflect a sociocultural perspective. This study aimed to compare the pedagogical effects of two teaching approaches, in a…

The inquiry approach to learning is based on three phases. The exploratory phase encourages students to investigate a particular topic; the invention phase asks students to consider what they have learned; the final phase assists students in discovering the inadequacies of their inventions. (JN)

This article describes an activity in measurement and geometry in which sixth-grade students explore the volume and surface area of a donut. Through calculation, creative thinking, and discovery, the students enhanced their geometric vocabulary and reasoning. (Contains 9 figures.)

This paper is a how-to manual for doing poetic mini-dramas (PMD) with elementary school students. It describes the possibilities for discovery learning through the dramatization of poetry, lists initial suggestions for the teacher and the actual steps in the process, and reports the attitudes and vocabulary growth of second and third graders after…

Students' preconceptions (also called misconceptions) interfere with desired learning and resist attempts to eradicate them. By applying previous findings about misconceptions regarding the particle model for gases, a new approach was designed for teaching the subject. A "critical situation" was treated in which students in sixth and…

History and the social sciences can be defined as recorded narratives or stories about the past or present that describe change and continuity over time and seek to explain this change and continuity through a series of cause and effect propositions based on evidence and shaped by the scholar's social frame of reference. In social studies there…

A research project examined whether students in an English 104 freshman composition class would develop the ability to think analogically and divergently by using synectics as an aid to invention in composition, and whether these students would develop a more positive attitude toward writing. (Synectics is a highly structured group activity based…

Maslow's (1971) theory of primary creativeness is used as the basis for a self-actualization model of education. Examples of how to use the model in creative homeschooling are provided. Key elements include digressive and immersion learning, self-directed learning, and the integration of work and play. Teaching suggestions are provided. (Contains…

Proposes that the psychological problem of students expecting a particular result in an organic chemistry laboratory and, therefore, working in an unthinking manner be attacked by assigning experiments that give students unexpected results. Gives four examples of such experiments with strategies for teaching them. (CW)