This paper identifies five types of learning experiences which are relevant to understanding students' grasp of concepts and principles. These include exploring existing concepts, honing and clustering concepts, developing analytical and reasoning skills, developing problem solving skills, and structuring knowledge in memory. Each of these…

This report intends to describe a program designed to enhance reading comprehension. Reading comprehension relies on skills that enable students to remember facts, draw out main ideas, make inferences, and relate reading to personal experiences. The focus group consisted of middle and high school students in a metropolitan area in northern…

This document features the experiences of three science teachers who video and audiotaped classroom proceedings in order to go back over what was said in classroom events, to explore the intentions and ideas that were perhaps not fully understood at the time. Mary DiSchino, who teaches 3rd and 4th graders, teaches a science curriculum which she…

The British National Curriculum suggests that a range of thinking skills need to be taught. But can children be taught to think? This paper takes the view that all thinking is embedded in a particular context. It gives an account of its author/educators' work with children, draws attention to distinctive features of their approach to teaching, and…

Most Americans think of the Fourth of July as Independence Day, but is it really the day the U.S. declared and celebrated independence? By exploring myths and truths surrounding Independence Day, this lesson asks students to think critically about commonly believed stories regarding the beginning of the Revolutionary War and the Independence Day…

The North Carolina Standard Course of Study aims to guarantee that all students have equal access to education. This revised North Carolina Standard Course of Study for English Language Arts is intended as a flexible guide to instruction, emphasizing what students should know and be able to do as they progress through various levels of…

This book is designed as a comprehensive introductory text for first and second year college students of language and linguistics. It provides a chapter on each of the more established areas of linguistics, such as lexicology, morphology, syntax, phonetics and phonology, historical linguistics, and language typology and on some newer areas such as…

This report describes a program for improving students' comprehension of the language of mathematical problems. The targeted population consists of 5th and 6th grade multi-age students and multi-age learners with special needs at a middle school located outside a major city in a Midwestern community. Evidence for the existence of this problem…

This is the third in a four-book series describing 16 types of intelligent behavior called habits of mind. It considers how to assess and report student progress in using the habits of mind, maintaining that a critical attribute of intelligence is not only having information but also knowing how to act on it. After the "Series Foreword:…

Aimed at parents of early adolescents, this book helps parents provide the skills teens need to cope with life's everyday frustrations and to make informed decisions about problems such as the stresses of homework, friendship, contending with peer pressure, and dealing with bullies. The foundation of the book is the "I Can Problem Solve" (ICPS)…

This paper describes how one college professor explains the concepts of schemes, assimilation, accommodation, and equilibrium to college undergraduates enrolled in educational or development psychology courses. The professor uses classroom demonstration to show how the concepts interact in an applied setting. The demonstration uses 30 children's…

The results of this study are consistent with a two-stage model of learning chemistry, a multi-dimensional subject, in which students accumulate knowledge in stage one, and then restructure their knowledge in stage two. When cognitive, metacognitive and achievement variables were subjected to a predictive discriminant analysis (PDA) procedure,…

Incorporating an integrated curriculum around a subject matter takes creativity on the part of the teacher. Using fine art, specifically, reproduction postcards of famous paintings for a second-grade science lesson pertaining to the Hudson River, enhances aesthetic appreciation while utilizing storytelling, writing and illustration skills. Using…

This unit of study (for grades 5 and up) on George Washington, the first President of the United States, was prepared by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association. The unit contains three main elements: (1) 14 diverse classroom activities involving the use of various documents and supplements that can be adapted as primary sources; (2) the document…

This comparative case study investigated instructional methods that effectively enhance the development of students' critical thinking. Four institutions were selected for study; two at which students reported experiencing high degrees of growth in the ability to think critically, and two at which students reported experiencing low degrees of…