The purpose of many animal studies at early grades is to build observation skills, develop a knowledge base, and practice age-appropriate science skills like comparing, describing, and drawing. While these are important learning experiences, the National Science Education Standards also recommend that students engage in scientific inquiry (NRC…

"Working Smarter, Not Harder: Reaching the Tough to Teach" is the topic of an exclusive four-part series by Sylvia Rockwell for the "Kappa Delta Pi Record." Part I describes the characteristics of students at risk of school failure, provides an overview of research-based principles found to be effective with all students and essential for students…

It is easy for intermediate students to get the wrong ideas about the purpose of reading. Educators pay so much attention to decoding and fluency in the early years that children sometimes come to believe that flawless and rapid word recognition is the point. As texts get more demanding or unfamiliar, some of the "good readers" in classes begin to…

Since prior knowledge is positively linked with reading comprehension, methods of measuring prior knowledge are important. A word association test is a useful technique for evaluating topic familiarity and enables the teacher to make decisions about how much additional information is needed for students to process a text successfully. (SRT)

Experiential learning is a time-honored approach that can help to "...seal the bond between the learner and the learned." Such learning encourages the making of meaning from individual and shared experiences and helps abstract concepts to become relevant to the learner. The 20th century educational theorist, John Dewey, articulated a…

In line with the cognitive theory of multimedia learning by Moreno and Mayer (2007), an interactive, multimodal learning environment was designed for the pretraining of science concepts in the joint area of physics, chemistry, biology, applied mathematics, and computer sciences. In the experimental set up, a pretest was embedded in order to…

Teachers can help minority children close the academic achievement gap in intermediate and middle school by combining literacy instruction and content-area material. This connection improves reading achievement and increases curriculum knowledge, even if students have previously experienced difficulty with primary school reading. Fortunately,…

The purpose of this practice brief is to provide schools, districts, and states with background knowledge about best practices for older students who struggle to read. It focuses on the reading skills that adolescents need to more fully access content-area curricula and, in turn, secure a productive future. The authors define adolescent reading as…

Through the efforts of National Center for Engineering and Technology Education (NCETE), three core engineering concepts within the realm of engineering design have emerged as crucial areas of need within secondary level technology education. These concepts are constraints, optimization, and predictive analysis (COPA). COPA appears to be at the…

This study assessed the influence of using mind maps as a learning tool on eighth graders' science achievement, whether such influence was mediated by students' prior scholastic achievement, and the relationship between students' mind maps and their conceptual understandings. Sixty-two students enrolled in four intact sections of a grade 8 science…

University instructors' classroom assessments play a central role in and inevitably influence their teaching and their students' learning. This paper reports on a comparative interview study conducted in a range of three ESL/EFL university contexts in Canada, Hong Kong and China. Six major aspects of ESL/EFL classroom assessment practices were…

The purpose of this review is to provide educational practitioners with a brief overview of cognitive load theory (CLT) and its major implications for learning. To achieve this objective, the article includes a short description of human cognitive architecture as conceived by cognitive load theorists. Following this overview, the article provides…

A semester-long ethnography study was carried out to investigate project-based learning in a graduate software engineering course through the implementation of an Open-Source Software Development (OSSD) learning environment, which featured authentic projects, learning community, cognitive apprenticeship, and technology affordances. The study…

In Uganda, curbing the spread of HIV/AIDS has largely depended on public and private media messages about the disease. Media campaigns based on Uganda's cultural norms of communication are metaphorical, analogical and simile-like. The topic of HIV/AIDS has been introduced into the Senior Three (Grade 11) biology curriculum in Uganda. To what…

This paper presents a case study of a teaching intervention designed to enrich Year 2 students' theory of biology through the introduction of causal mechanisms of inheritance such as the gene and DNA. The researchers worked collaboratively with the classroom teacher to design the intervention based on the students' prior knowledge of living things…