Analyzes perceptions of staff members concerning difficulties facing students in a first-year chemistry program. Results indicate that the staff have very different views of student difficulties and how they should be overcome. Suggests that it is important for staff to engage in conversation about such issues and to develop an awareness of…

Argues that the most productive future directions for theory building and research in applied linguistics derive from the extent to which the field's investigators can enrich their conceptual framework and methods with insights from "constructivist" scholarly approaches. Focus is on three arenas in which such approaches and additional scholarship…

Responds to a previous article on constructive and constructivist challenges for applied linguistics. (Author/JL)

Explores and challenges a number of assumptions and claims commonly associated with a constructivist approach to science education. Suggests that constructivist ideas are noteworthy within primary education because they help justify classroom practices and activities that primary school teachers regard as important. Greater clarity and precision…

Discusses instructional design models and examines rapid prototyping, a model that combines computer design strategies, constructivist learning theory, and cognitive psychology. Highlights include limitations of linear models; instructional problems appropriate and those not appropriate for rapid prototyping; and rapid prototyping as a paradigm…

Considers whether information science has a theory of information. Highlights include guides to information and its theory; constructivism; information outside information science; process theories; cognitive views of information; measuring information; meaning; and misinformation. (Contains 89 references.) (LRW)

Introduces concepts underlying the conversational science model of self-organized learning, and explains how it can influence the systems-thinking design of tools and educational procedures. Outlines person-based learning and comparative-learning models and discusses the context of person-based learning theory, the conversational learning model,…

Examines constructivist perspectives (cognitive, radical, social) in light of the requirements of career and technical education. Determines that cognitive constructivism is most compatible with the need for higher order thinking, problem solving, and collaboration. Urges rethinking of the assumptions underlying the mission, curriculum, and…

Explains a research project conducted at the University of Puerto Rico among students taking biology to develop and test a constructivist learning environment and identify students' misconceptions in biology. Lists the questions on which students showed misconceptions during the pre- and post-tests. (Contains 27 references.) (YDS)

Analyzes technological capabilities of the Web as a delivery platform for highly interactive learning resources, consistent with a constructivist view of learning. Shows that all of the required software capabilities can be implemented by Web technology and discusses barriers to use of the Web as a medium for such resources, including bandwidth.…

Recent educational computer-based technologies have offered promising lines of research that promote social constructivist learning goals, develop skills required to operate in a knowledge-based economy (Roschelle et al. 2000), and enable more authentic science-like problem-solving. In our research programme, we have been interested in combining…

Constructivist and conceptual change perspectives on learning have given rise to a number of models of constructivist classroom teaching. Motivation has been recognized as an important factor in the construction of knowledge and the process of conceptual change, so one could expect that motivation strategies would be integral components of…

As both classroom teaching practice and literature show, many students have difficulties learning science concepts such as density. Here are some investigations that identify the relationship between density and floating through experimenting with successive dilution of a liquid, or the systematic change of concentration of a saltwater solution.…

Children today live in different cultural settings. The pre-school culture is one of them and the media culture outside the pre-school another. These cultures are in different ways characterised by opposite and often even conflicting traditions. This article shows how educators and children handle this dilemma by using interaction as a tool to…

A number of pedagogies and approaches are often quoted in the e-learning literature--constructivism, communities of practice, collaboration--but we suggest that much of what is described could more easily be explained in terms of didactic and behaviourist approaches to learning. In this paper we propose a model that supports the development of…