Educational experiences need to (1.) increase student activities inside and outside the classroom; (2.) promote knowledge acquisition and educational performance; (3.) increase group-based and cooperative learning; and, (4.) assist students in developing solutions to real-world, complex problems. To address these issues, this research blended…

The educational practice called inclusion has brought increasing numbers of children with disabilities into the music classroom, many times without the teacher being informed of these students' unique needs. In order for music teachers to successfully teach in an inclusive classroom, they must be prepared to work effectively with special learners,…

This paper presents the results of part of an investigation carried out with fourth-level Spanish secondary education students (15 years old), in which we implemented a teaching unit based on problem-solving methodology as an investigation to teach genetics and human inheritance curricular contents. By solving open problems, the students…

Results are presented of a series of focus-group sessions held at Lancaster University during May 2002. Participants consisted of 12 undergraduate geography students chosen from amongst those identified as having strong antipathy towards quantitative material. The intention was to mine these students' perspectives on courses covering quantitative…

This article describes the pitfalls of using key words to support students when problem solving, and provides an alternative way (quantitative analysis) to support students' sense-making. (Contains 1 table and 2 figures.)

This article describes ways in which students develop schemas as they generalize and formalize patterns when solving related algebraic problems that involve size, shape, growth, and change. (Contains 7 figures and 3 tables.)

Worthwhile mathematical tasks not only prompt students to learn mathematics, they also prompt teachers to learn and improve their teaching in their own mathematics classrooms. When teachers use worthwhile tasks, they have to learn "what aspects of a task to highlight, how to organize and orchestrate the work of the students, what questions to ask…

This article describes the experience of teaching structural bioinformatics to third year undergraduate students in a subject titled "Biomolecular Structure and Bioinformatics." Students were introduced to computer programming and used this knowledge in a practical application as an alternative to the well established Internet bioinformatics…

The extensive use of commercial kits in molecular biology and biochemistry has prompted us to design a series of practical sessions to help students become familiar with the uses and limitations of pre-packaged assay systems. To facilitate an understanding of these assay systems and to promote reflection on their appropriate use, students…

The article analyzes a constructivist view of music education. A constructivist music classroom exemplifies deep learning when students formulate questions, acquire new knowledge by developing and implementing plans for investigating these questions, and reflect on the results. A context for deep learning requires that teachers and students work…

Strategy games can provide an interesting context for students to solve problems in an elementary mathematics classroom. The games are easy to learn, but finding a winning strategy exercises students to develop different methods to win the game.

Students in a fifth-grade general education class and a second-grade gifted class participated in the Triangular Bicycle Flags problem. The results indicated that providing students with geometric experiences at the correct van Hiele level is necessary for helping students move from one level of understanding to the next.

In this article, Hazel Lawson, principal lecturer in education at the University of Plymouth, Sue Waite, a researcher at the University of Plymouth, and Christopher Robertson, lecturer in special and inclusive education at the University of Birmingham, discuss the curriculum for students with severe and profound and multiple learning difficulties…

This article discusses situated cognition research and its impact on literacy studies concepts and instruction. It provides a brief historical comparison of cognitive psychology and situated cognition and emphasizes the importance of understanding the complex relationships that exist between learners, the settings in which they engage in cognitive…

Folklore-based learning is a kind of situated learning paradigm in which students learn by solving problems embedded in a near-real situation. The proposed learning approach employs further interesting story plots from folklores as the background situation to motivate students to participate in learning activities. It is believed that such a…