Effective teacher beliefs about students are an integral part of effective teaching. Teachers with interventionist beliefs about students ("I can intervene to help a learner with difficulties") show more effective practice than teachers with pathognomonic beliefs ("I blame the learner for his difficulties"). A professional development (PD) course…

The purpose of this study is to investigate aspects of musical interpretation and suggest guidelines for developing performance students' interpretative processes. Since musical interpretation involves basic issues concerning the nature of music, and competing concepts of "interpretation" and its teaching, an overview of these issues is given.…

Using a pretest-posttest quasi-experimental control group design, a learning environment study was conducted to evaluate the environmental literacy of postsecondary, nonscience majors. Data were collected from 183 students taking an introductory environmental science class--a 41-question Environmental Literacy Instrument (ELI) prompted students…

This article reports on students' learning through conjecturing, by drawing on a semester-long teaching experiment with 6 sixth-grade students. It focuses on 1 of the students, Josh, who developed especially powerful ways of operating over the course of the teaching experiment. Through a fine-grained analysis of Josh's actions, this article…

In this study, statements by prospective primary school teachers such as "I think the word global warming ..." or "I think the term global warming means ..." were analyzed by using qualitative phenomenographic research methods. 142 female (48.3%) and 152 male (51.7%) primary school teacher candidates (n = 294) participated in…

Parker Palmer is correct in his claims that good teaching depends more on the capacity for connectedness than on technique and that helping teacher candidates cultivate a strong sense of personal identity is crucial. However, to what extent are Palmer's claims compatible with the various constructivist models of learning that are now prevalent in…

This article focuses on spontaneous knowledge-building in the field of "the arithmetic "of" the child." The aim is to investigate the conceptual progress of fifteen children during their early school years in the compulsory school. The study is based on the epistemology of radical constructivism and the methodology of…

While blogs, wikis and social networking sites are enjoying high levels of attention as tools to support learning, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) remains the "poor cousin" of these technologies in the higher education classroom, with relatively low uptake amongst educators and students. In this article, the authors argue that the affordances of…

Previous research has established a close link between students' conceptions of learning and approaches to learning. Until recently, only a few quantitative studies have investigated the relationship between high school students' conceptions of learning science and the approaches they adopt to learning science. This study sought to address this…

Despite the ascendancy of constructivism, it seems that many, if not most, educationists in higher education and elsewhere still assume there is some transference of information to the learner from the social or physical environment, and that any process of interpretation and construction takes place after this basic information has been passively…

The reality is that approximately 5-8% of school-age students have memory or other cognitive deficits that interfere with their ability to acquire, master, and apply mathematical concepts and skills (Geary, 2004). These students with Mathematical Learning Disabilities (MLD) are at risk for failure in middle school mathematics because they…

This paper describes a study in which professors explored and refined their perspectives about pedagogy and university teaching. Results show that collaborative, inquiry-based faculty development influenced their growth as effective educators. More frequent feedback from students and colleagues was seen as a major factor in helping professors…

Repeated poor performance by students with special needs on the Indiana Statewide Test of Educational Progress (ISTEP) in an Indiana middle school supported the need for instructional changes. Following the implementation of a full inclusion program, a problem arose in that the program had not been evaluated and effectiveness was in question. This…

This qualitative case study research design investigated puppetry as a holistic constructivist instructional practice for children with learning disabilities that included puppeteers and special education teachers as coresearchers. The purpose of the study was to investigate how puppetry can be an effective instructional practice for children with…

The children's taunt "Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers" gives new credence to the information search process at the elementary school level. Children keep what they find, claim it as their own, and accept information without discernment or critique. This study examines the effectiveness of teaching information literacy skills through…