Teachers may use apprenticeships and collaboration as instructional strategies that help students to make authentic scientific discoveries as they work as amateur researchers in academic field studies. This concept was examined with 643 students, ages 14-72, who became proficient at field research through cognitive apprenticeships with the…

Although Web-based instruction provides learners with sufficient resources for self-paced learning, previous studies have confirmed that browsing navigation-oriented Web sites possibly hampers users' comprehension of information. Web sites designed as "categories of materials" for navigation demand more cognitive effort from users to orient their…

The current National Curriculum for history requires pupils to "identify and investigate specific historical questions, making and testing hypotheses for themselves". While Kate Hammond relished the encouragement that this gave to her pupils to engage in the process of historical enquiry, she was keen to develop a much clearer sense of…

This article presents the concept of creative potential and its link to talent. Psychological measures to assess creative potential in children and adolescents (EPoC) and adults (Creative Profiler) are then described. Implications for developing creativity are proposed.

Inherently a discovery-based pedagogy, Disassemble/Analyze/Assemble (DAA) activities start with the artefact--an instance of a typically well-engineered solution. Through systemized disassembly and the subsequent analysis of components, students engage in an iterative process of observation and follow-up probing. In-turn, this process helps…

Although the human mind resists confusion, this feeling of disequilibrium nurtures learning. Newkirk, the author quotes, says intelligence is not a matter of being smart--it is the capacity to view difficulty as an opportunity to stop, reassess, and employ strategies for making sense of problems. These same habits of mind define reflection, a…

Background: The process of problem solving is difficult for students; thus, mathematics educators have made multiple attempts to seek ways of making this process more accessible to learners. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect size statistic of utilizing exploratory computerized environments (ECEs) to support the process of word…

This paper focuses on a pedagogical and instructional approach to engaging students in the classroom with the specific activity of a writing prompt, which utilizes a short video about current events and trends coupled with writing and discussion. This strategy allows active student learning in which the students engage, develop critical thinking…

There is a dearth of research regarding young children with high intellectual abilities, particularly research involving the direct observation of children in naturalistic settings. The current study examines 2 years of observations of young children (aged 37-71 months; n = 34) at an early childhood facility. The children were observed during the…

Two questionnaires were used to investigate students' perceptions of their motivation to opt for reception learning (RL) or self-discovery learning (SDL) in histology and their choices of complementary learning strategies (CLS). The results demonstrated that the motivation to attend RL sessions was higher than the motivation to attend SDL to gain…

In this study, we examined 10 expert and 10 novice teachers' noticing of classroom events in China. It was found that both expert and novice teachers, who were selected from two cities in China, highly attended to developing students' mathematics knowledge coherently and developing students' mathematical thinking and ability; they also paid…

As part of their undergraduate mathematics curriculum, students at Brock University learn to create and use computer-based tools with dynamic, visual interfaces, called Exploratory Objects, developed for the purpose of conducting pure or applied mathematical investigations. A student's Development Process Model of creating and using an Exploratory…

General education must develop in students an appreciation of the power of science, how it works, why it is an effective knowledge generation tool, and what it can deliver. Knowing what science has discovered is desirable but less important.

Just as individual teachers have orientations to teaching and learning science that influence their practice, we assert that professional development (PD) projects also have an orientation that guides the design and implementation of the entire project; a construct we term "PD Project Orientation". The purpose of this study was to validate the…

This article examines the issue of using authentic speech data in an experimental research paradigm. We report exploratory studies to replicate a seminal investigation of listeners' abilities to predict sentence completion in constructed read-aloud data. Our initial intention was to see whether the same gating instrument used on authentic talk…