Identifies personal and contextual factors that make learning from experience for teachers difficult; argues the need to learn more about how teachers learn and what is needed to foster that learning in the school context, while lending insight into the complexity of teacher reflection and teacher learning in classroom environments. (GLR)

Study surveyed South Dakota's Native American and Euro-Asian elementary teachers regarding differences in learning styles between Native American and Euro-Asian children. Analysis revealed significant differences in the way the two groups view factors contributing to lower reading achievement of Native American students. (SM)

A study evaluated the effectiveness of contextual organizers for subjects (n=276) of three cognitive styles (field dependent, field independent, and field intermediate) during computer-assisted instruction. Findings were advance organizers were more effective for field-dependent subjects; postorgainzers were more effective for field-intermediate…

Discusses the empowerment approach in health education, emphasizing the role of health educators as collaborators sensitive to each participant, group, and context. Empowerment programs do not blame the participant or the environment, but instead work collaboratively to enhance growth and change in the facilitators, participants, and environments.…

Based on the author's experience with a Rust Belt high school literacy-development project, this article discusses how teachers use process-centered innovations in language arts classrooms, the pedagogical impulses behind the innovations, and their contributions to student learning. Rather than diminishing students' learning, inquiry-based…

Teachers must learn to distinguish among performance assessments of different quality and appropriateness. Design criteria (cognitive complexity, linguistic appropriateness, content quality and coverage, and meaningfulness) are judged by examining assessment tasks and scoring rubrics. Effects criteria (transfer, generalizability, instructional…

Like medieval war games of dialectical argument, today's education model is based on idea of competition, a scholastic sorting process aimed at fixing every child's place in life. So long as access to higher education rests on standardized test scores and/or high school grades in conventional subjects, higher education institutions will subject…

Recent research suggests three major realms of experience from which visitors draw schemata that inform meaning-making at heritage sites: (1) associations with and knowledge of history; (2) experiences and behavior regarding the past in everyday life; and (3) expectations of and behavior at heritage sites. Presents three strategies for empirically…

Examined links between parenting and preschoolers' peer competence. Found that parent-child play was associated with boys', but not girls', peer competence. Mothers' coaching was associated with girls', but not boys', competence. Mothers' or fathers' involvement in child-peer play predicted lower or higher child competence, respectively. Mothers'…

Data from the 1990 Ecuadorian census indicate that expected fertility-reducing effects of women's education, student status, and labor force participation were lessened in the Amazon as a consequence of its family-based economy, class structure, and high-fertility demographic regime. Development of the extractive periphery in Ecuador is…

Discusses aspects of context from a relevance-theoretic perspective and considers how this may lead to a better understanding of how language learners recover verbal input. Proposes that the way context is defined affects (1) the relationship between knowledge of language and context and (2) the way speakers access assumptions in everyday…

Investigates the procedural understanding of first-year university science students in South Africa. Explores ideas related to the reliability of experimental data and discusses the types of reasoning underlying the responses. (DDR)

Examines the transferability of five Japanese indirect request strategies to corresponding English request contexts. Findings indicate that the Japanese strategies were differentially transferable and the transferability of each first-language request strategy was determined by interaction between the politeness and conventionality encoded in each…

Reviews the academic literature of distance education that has considered whether the media and technologies of education affect learning and finds the conventional answer is in the negative. Also describes this issue in literature in the following fields: neurology, mass communications, and feminist approaches to the situated nature of knowledge.…

Responses of 138 third and fourth graders to failures and successes in mathematics computation were studied in 4 experimental conditions varied by social learning context and modeling. The collaborative learning context increased student persistence after failure and dynamism after success, and modeling increased persistence and dynamism in an…