This study was designed to assess the effects of a specific cooperative learning strategy in an introductory college business information systems course. The cooperative approach's impact on student achievement and on a number of personal and social attributes was examined. A total of 117 college sophomores and freshmen enrolled in 3 sections of…

Developed by the Learning Resource Centres (LRC) Project Team at Sir Sanford Fleming College, in Ontario, Canada, this report presents a model for establishing LRCs at the college. The first section reviews the need for LRCs, including the provision of lifelong learning and expected funding decreases for traditional operations. The next sections…

In cooperative learning, children are assigned to small groups to work on curriculum-based tasks while teachers move among the groups to offer assistance and to monitor progress. Despite the benefits and appeal of this learning method, it has been demonstrated that not all cooperative learning groups are equally successful in the classroom. In…

When students become actively involved in technology productions they develop learning skills, communication skills, and visual analysis skills, all of which are applied to real-life learning within the classroom curriculum. Students participate in all stages of the production projects, which proves to be motivating for the students and allows the…

This report, in support of the project "Enhanced Learning through Electronic Communities," investigated successful practices of electronic communities. A literature review was conducted and a survey was sent to 15 system operators of networks that had a community-based focus with ancillary educational components and networks that focused primarily…

Today's social and demographic changes demand that elementary and secondary education incorporate social skills and affective education in the curriculum. One way for this to be accomplished is through an interdisciplinary approach. Numerous curriculum resources which use an interdisciplinary approach and address affective skills are available for…

This paper presents some of the overall findings of the Cooperative Reading Project (CRP), a collaboration between six teachers in a bilingual Spanish/English elementary school and a team of university researchers to examine and improve upon cooperative learning literacy instruction. The CRP took a social constructivist learning stance toward…

This paper reports on a 12-week study of 131 students in eight fourth-grade social studies classrooms in two elementary schools in the southwestern United States with low socioeconomic, high minority populations. Although research has indicated that cooperative learning enhances student achievement, promotes self-esteem, and improves interpersonal…

This handbook defines and describes the benefits of both collaborative approaches and cooperative techniques. An introduction uses watercolor marbling as a metaphor for collaborative approaches and cooperative activities. Section I provides research results regarding problems of adult literacy programs, skills employers want, and Bloom's taxonomy.…

The purpose of this study was to describe and interpret teacher decision-making with ethnically diverse students. A new paradigmatic theoretical framework formed through the confluence of constructivism, multiculturalism, the teacher-as-decision-maker, and semiology guided the research. The research site was a suburban middle school located in the…

This guide instructs parents on how to maximize their children's educational opportunities at home and in school. A detailed agenda is given to help children and their teachers foster real learning, learning that is more than memorizing data or competing for grades. Real learning is discovering how to think, expressing creativity, and developing…

This volume explores the role and implications of collaborative learning for the mission and future of higher education and college teaching. Part I discusses the implications of nonfoundational social constructionist thought for colleges and universities. Nonfoundational notions of knowledge and social relations argue that knowledge has no…

In Talent Development Middle Schools, students needing extra help in mathematics participate in the Computer- and Team-Assisted Mathematics Acceleration (CATAMA) course. CATAMA is an innovative combination of computer-assisted instruction and structured cooperative learning that students receive in addition to their regular math course for about…

It is known that first year Information Systems students have different levels of computer literacy when they enter the university. This is specifically the case in South Africa, where large numbers of students come from disadvantaged educational backgrounds. Universities sometimes try to overcome the disparity in computer literacy by introducing…

This paper presents an information agent and latent semantic-based indexing architecture to retrieve documents on the Internet. The system optimizes the search for documents in the Internet by automatically retrieving relevant links. The information used for the search can be obtained, for instance, from Internet browser caches and from grades of…