Experience in the workplace represents a significant domain for the analysis of learning. Based on many years of research on high-school and college interns, the article proposes a set of interdisciplinary ideas and strategies for conducting such an analysis. The core argument is that learning is the construction, enhancement or reorganization of…

New times demand new interpretations of what it means to be numerate in a global world. Policy and curriculum documents uphold notions of capable young learners, actively engaged in investigative learning processes that will carry them on to competent and confident participation in the social and economic world of tomorrow. However, as the author…

In this contribution we describe a short development course for in-service physics teachers. The course structure and materials are based on the results of educational research, and its main objective is to provide in-service teachers with a first contact with the active learning strategy "Tutorials in Introductory Physics," developed by…

This article begins by identifying that children have a spontaneous predilection for playing with language, engaging in poetic discourse even before their first poetry lesson. Although children's language play is relatively unresearched in the classroom, in a case study of two groups of pupils aged between 10 and 11, it was observed that children…

There are some who believe that getting rid of the testing required by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) will solve current educational problems. In this article, the authors argue that, with or without NCLB, both students and teachers need spaces of liberty for meaningful learning. Teachers need spaces in which they can negotiate the curriculum in…

The fundamental goal of any STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) course must be to involve students in the acquisition and mastery of the knowledge, skills, and perspectives of a technical discipline. This chapter describes an instructional model for infusing social and cultural learning into a technical course. This model…

This paper suggests that mathematics teacher educators should listen carefully to what their students are saying. More specifically, it demonstrates how from one pre-teacher's non-traditional geometric representation of a unit fraction, a variety of learning environments that lead to the enrichment of mathematics for teaching can be developed. The…

This paper raises the issue of what it is to be "critical" in education studies and in social theory more generally. It argues that this idea has for a long time been associated with forms of social constructionism and sociological reductionism. These understand the idea that knowledge is social in terms of reducing it to the experiences and…

This study represents an effort to construct a learning framework for knowledge building and collective wisdom advancement in a virtual learning community (VLC) from the perspectives of system wholeness, intelligence wholeness and dynamics, learning models, and knowledge management. It also tries to construct the zone of proximal development (ZPD)…

Students' views about science were correlated with their approaches to lab practice. Three distinct cases are discussed in detail: empiricist-oriented, rationalist-oriented, and constructivist-oriented students. A coherent epistemological theory was constructed for each case, by considering the different degrees of certainty and confidence each…

This study reflects a social constructivist theoretical framework in which the zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a central element, as two teaching approaches, communicative language teaching (CLT) and explicit focus on form (FonF) are examined. Research questions include: Are CLT and explicit FonF conducive to reaching the ZPD? Is there a…

In this research, we examine the design, construction, and implementation of a dynamic, easy to use, feedback mechanism for social software. The tool was integrated into an existing university's online learning community (OLC). In line with constructivist learning models and practical information systems (IS) design, the feedback system provides…

The late Donald C. Stewart's assertion that "the era of the cognitive psychologists is waning; the era of the social constructionists is just beginning" drew attention to a major ontological and epistemological shift in composition studies. This shift demanded a methodology to accommodate it. Some composition researchers have considered…

The relative cognitive requirements and benefits of learning from non-contrived experience and information presentation is considered. The advantages and costs are contrasted with contrived experience and information-reduction that are features of instruction. An overview is given of one method of viewing the relationship between experience and…

The opinion in this paper is that there is a need to reexamine the meaning of constructivism in an age where the concept has come to mean different things to different people. This paper examines one person's understanding of constructivism in order to uncover multiple meanings of the term in ways that ultimately affect teachers' practice in K-12…