The music classroom is the perfect setting for investigative and imaginative inquiry--for teaching students how to talk about music. Because dialogue that is done well is too dynamic to be captured in a one-dimensional model, the ideas and frameworks in this article are merely intended to serve as springboards for eliciting richer discussions in…

This intervention targets distortions in thinking which contribute to conflict with students and staff. After numerous assault charges in her school, June was placed in residential treatment. During her first sixty days, she experienced several crisis situations which included assaults on staff and students, physical restraints, and eventual…

Assessment practitioners and policymakers have focused a good deal of their attention in the past several years on the general intellectual skills that students acquire in college. The American Association of Colleges and Universities' Greater Expectations Project, the Pew Forum on Undergraduate Learning, and the National Forum on College-Level…

The research reported in this study focuses on an investigation into the teaching of argumentation in secondary science classrooms. Over a 1-year period, a group of 12 teachers from schools in the greater London area attended a series of workshops to develop materials and strategies to support the teaching of argumentation in scientific contexts.…

This article explores 2 important aspects of metacognition: (a) how students monitor their ongoing performance to detect and correct errors and (b) how students reflect on those errors to learn from them. Although many instructional theories have advocated providing students with immediate feedback on errors, some researchers have argued that…

Research shows that learners of all ages have difficulties deploying key cognitive and metacognitive self-regulatory skills during learning about complex and challenging topics when using open-ended learning environments such as hypermedia. This article provides an overview of the research my students and I have conducted on how the use of…

Outcomes for methods to accelerate thinking skills involving some peer interaction have been more consistently positive than those for purely teacher-directed or materials-led methods. However, methods involving mainly or only peer interaction are rare. This paper describes and evaluates such a method for peer tutoring in thinking skills, which…

Critical thinking is a highly valued outcome of university study, although its nature is difficult to define. Most students are not directly taught critical thinking, but are expected to display it in at least some of their assignments. We do not know much about student perceptions of their development as critical thinkers in their degree…

This study extends research on moral reasoning competence in juvenile delinquents to their practical reasoning and perception of an institutional moral atmosphere in order to find out whether a delay in moral competence is one of the causes of the offence or one of the consequences of institutionalization or both. The study involved 64 delinquent…

The idea of causality is central in science and has long given rise to debate among philosophers and scientists. While the tendency to avoid causality seems to have become dominant in science and philosophy, research in science education has shown the strong presence in common reasoning of causal explanations, often conceived as a 'mechanism'…

A simple model for how traffic moves around a closed loop of road is introduced. The consequent analysis of the model can be used as an application of techniques taught at first year undergraduate level, and as a motivator to encourage students to think critically about model formulation and interpretation.

In this article, we examine the role of visuospatial cognition in chemistry learning. We review three related kinds of literature: correlational studies of spatial abilities and chemistry learning, students' conceptual errors and difficulties understanding visual representations, and visualization tools that have been designed to help overcome…

This article describes the implementation of an activity designed to confront a common misconception about variable. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)

By shifting pedagogical goals from obtaining successful mutations to teaching students critical troubleshooting skills, it has been possible to introduce site-directed mutagenesis into an undergraduate teaching laboratory. Described in this study is an inexpensive laboratory exercise in which students follow a slightly modified version of…

Kimberly Huber's preliminary exploration of critical literacy is traced. The critical literacy project in which a complex set of literate practices taught the grade 2 and 3 children about power and the possibilities for local civic action is discussed.