In most teacher education courses, instructional strategies are merely listed and explained. Students rarely have the opportunity to see these strategies in use until they become student teachers. What better way to teach secondary instructional strategies to pre-service teachers than by modeling these strategies using teacher education content?…

An understanding of student learning and of the reasons for differential student performance is crucial to improving teaching and learning practices in tertiary education. This article aims to contribute to that understanding by reporting on an empirical study which examined two sets of student texts on the topic "What is law?", written…

While some geographers have embraced active learning as a means to engage students in a course, many others stick to conventional teaching methods. They are often deterred by suggestions that it can be difficult to implement active learning where students have no prior knowledge of a subject, that active learning requires too much work of…

The authors teach upper-level science courses in cell biology, genetics, and biochemistry at a public, four-year "community university" that serves a demographically diverse population of traditional and nontraditional students. In this article, they describe some of the issues they have found to be particularly significant at their "community…

Investigates the effects of prior knowledge, presentation time, and selected task demands on information processed by college students of two-dimensional visual art that displayed varying abstraction levels. Results indicated that the amount and type of information subjects remembered about visual art were influenced by each of these factors.…

Explains why writing is a mysterious, complex process dependent on a lifetime of experiencing, feeling, and thinking, and why English teachers should be emphasizing writing to an audience more than the learning of mechanical rules. (RL)

Results are reported from a study which showed that activating competent readers' naive conceptions about a complex science concept is not as effective in dispelling inaccurate information as activating their naive conceptions and then explicitly directing them to read and attend to ideas that might differ from their own. (IAH)

The relationships among gender, interest in and experience with electricity, and conceptual change text manipulations were studied for 48 male and 50 female college students learning basic electricity concepts. Conceptual change text facilitated learning, as expected. Interactions of gender and interest are discussed. (SLD)

Describes effective instructional practices for students who are acquiring English as a Second Language, grouped under two fundamental pedagogic principles: providing an encouraging learning environment for self-expression and deep personal involvement, and developing children's background knowledge. (SR)

This article profiles a high school physics teacher who received a grant to conduct research, with his own classes, designed to identify students' preconceptions about the physical world, explore ways teachers can use those preconceptions to teach physical laws, and prepare classroom materials that teachers can use to teach physics. (IAH)

Presents an approach for teaching the multiplication of fractions by helping students build a foundation on the basis of their informal knowledge. Suggests some action research ideas for teachers to try in their classrooms. (ASK)

Argues that, since all students learn differently, and since connections must be built for new learning, teachers should plan the introduction of a unit to incorporate a variety of pre-learning activities that play to the different learning styles in the classroom while building a basis of prior knowledge in the students, thus connecting as many…

This article examines how the Dual-Situated Learning Model (DSLM) facilitates a radical change of concepts that involve the understanding of matter, process, and hierarchical attributes. The DSLM requires knowledge of students' prior beliefs of science concepts and the nature of these concepts. In addition, DSLM also serves two functions: it…

This study examined the effectiveness of a computer-based environment employing three example-based instructional procedures (example-problem, problem-example, and fading) to teach series and parallel electrical circuit analysis to learners classified by two levels of prior knowledge (low and high). Although no differences between the…

This article is a reflective account of a teacher implementing the comprehension strategy of questioning to encourage genuine conversations with text, instead of the inquisition technique of testing comprehension practiced in many classrooms. Through the structure of a "gradual release of responsibilities," students practice questioning in…