Most parents of gifted children are aware of the benefit of having books and other hands-on learning materials available to their children. However, there is more involved in creating a thoughtful and intellectual learning environment at home than just books and science kits. The way a group communicates, what it communicates, and what it values…

Within the already limited literature on instructional practices in detracked classrooms, there are even fewer research-based studies of detracked science classrooms. This article attempts to address this gap in the research literature, delving into the unique challenges and instructional responses to teaching detracked science. The authors report…

This longitudinal case-study aimed at examining whether purposely teaching for the promotion of higher order thinking skills enhances students' critical thinking (CT), within the framework of science education. Within a pre-, post-, and post-post experimental design, high school students, were divided into three research groups. The experimental…

Narrative inquiry and self-study are used as analytic and conceptual lenses to examine the author's teacher education course where he attempted to introduce the relevance and centrality of race and racism in society and thus education. Implications of the study point to the important role of personal experiences in curriculum development and…

Teachers can use pedometers to facilitate inquiry learning and show students the need for mathematics in scientific investigation. The authors conducted activities with secondary students that investigated intake and expenditure components of the energy balance algorithm, which led to inquiries about pedometers and related data. By investigating…

This paper excerpts a report based on the National Academy of Education's "Preparing Teachers for a Changing World: What Teachers Should Learn and Be Able to Do," which summarizes research on learning, teaching, and teacher education. In this article, the authors discuss how teachers can prepare to become highly qualified and how they can acquire…

The term "research paper," in the sense of researched paper, is a tautology: all expository discourses are researched in some way. One of the first duties of writing instructors is to help students see the difference between reporting on information that already exists about a topic, in what is sometimes referred to as a "library…

The purpose of this study was to identify which instructional models based on the framework of Joyce, Weil, and Showers, could be used effectively in distance education over the Interactive Video Network (IVN) system in North Dakota. Instructional models have been organized into families such as Information Processing, Social, Personal, and…

This study was designed to investigate the effect on teachers and their students of a model of professional development that immerses teachers in scientific inquiry appropriate to their classrooms while modeling the use of reform-based pedagogical strategies for teaching science. The course was designed and team taught as a collaborative effort…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how explanation is interactively constituted in two mathematics instructional sequences during one year-long teaching experiment in a second grade classroom. The position taken is that classroom norms for what constitutes an acceptable explanation are a joint construction between teacher and students.…

This document describes a two-year integrated biology and chemistry curriculum for ninth and tenth grade students. The first chapter outlines the rationale for integrating biology and chemistry and presents the topic sequence for the integrated curriculum. Chapter 2 discusses the developmental, cognitive, and philosophical issues that form the…

The purpose of this causal-comparative study was to compare attitudes that male and female preservice elementary science methods teachers have toward science and science teaching. The stratified random sample (n=80) was drawn from the population of preservice elementary teachers enrolled in an elementary science methods course during fall 1990,…

This book summarizes the major conceptual dilemmas facing feminist intellectuals in academia today. It shows how scholars in very different disciplines can draw on particularities of race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and voice to enrich and contextualize the knowledge they produce. Examined are agency, perspectives, value judgments,…

This teaching guide focuses on Arctic-nesting shorebirds. The format of each section consists of background information, student activities, observation and research ideas, and key words. Basic information on how to use this curriculum and seven sections devoted to different aspects of Arctic-nesting shorebird life are provided. Sections cover…

This paper explores a model of professional development that theoretically extends to new teachers a bridge from inquiry-oriented preparation into the first years of teaching. Inquiry-oriented teacher education habituates novice teachers into professional habits of heart and mind that are difficult to sustain given the reigning modes of…