This bulletin offers guidelines to help parents and teachers improve the thinking skills of gifted children. It stresses the importance of encouraging thinking through the use of evocative questions, distinguishes between and defines critical thinking and creative thinking, and offers suggested questions to prompt either creative/divergent…

This study examined meta-cognitive strategies utilized by bilingual, Hispanic 6th graders from three Chicago public schools that had embraced a staff development initiative designed to help increase Hispanic students' reading comprehension levels. The Strategic Teaching and Reading Project (STRP) emphasizes five basic comprehension strategies:…

This research report describes strategies that can be used to enable students to appropriately use the scientific method to solve problems during labs and activities. The targeted population consists of middle school science students in a growing middle class suburban area. Evidence of their lack of understanding and application of the scientific…

This study explores the nature and meaning of various epistemological and affective issues that shape elementary teachers' work, such as ways of knowing, beliefs about the nature of science, values, emotions, and teachers' images of themselves as knowers. Through analyses of two teachers' narratives, classroom observations, and instructional…

This report describes a program implemented to improve reading comprehension in the content areas. The targeted population will consist of students in grades two, three, four, and five, in five midwestern schools, four public and one private. The problem of poor comprehension will be documented through test scores, parent and student surveys, and…

This study aimed to help the teachers clarify and understand the nature of science (NOS), as well as classroom practice through the implementation of the constructivist teaching model. Ten elementary science teachers were involved in a year-long in-service program that included a series of intervention courses. Following the intervention courses,…

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 book provides research-based, concrete strategies for creating a student-centered curriculum in which every student can learn. It breaks down the Natural Human Learning Process (NHLP) into six stages, providing guidelines and models showing educators how to create learning experiences at each stage of the process for individuals, small…

This paper synthesizes research on the value of writing in learning science at all grade levels. Breakthroughs and barriers to the effective use of writing to learn science are discussed. Differences between elementary and secondary teachers are considered with regard to background in language arts, understanding of the writing process, and the…

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,…

This practicum was designed to use directed reading thinking activity strategies to teach reading comprehension skills to middle grades language arts students who frequently failed to make passing scores in reading comprehension exercises. The program included three specific strategies. The first strategy was to teach the students higher-order…

With support from the John Templeton Foundation, the authors held a Summit on Acceleration at The University of Iowa in May 2003. They invited distinguished scholars and educators from around the country to help them formulate a national report on acceleration. This first volume of the Templeton Report on acceleration trumpets an alarm to the…

An educational researcher suggests that "Philosophy and Education: Eightieth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education" should have dealt with: (1) the nature of educational inquiry and its relationship to the social sciences and (2) how philosophical treatment of knowledge, thinking, and learning relate to…

Argues that metacognitive training in students can help students to remediate comprehension difficulties, to more accurately guage their success as learners, and to view reading as a flexible, thought-provoking process of interaction with text. (HOD)

Explores the impact of a change in status in language programs and the culture of second language learning in Australian schools, particularly in light of declared goals such as a language other than English for all and the integration of language teaching and learning with Australia's external political and economic priorities. (32 references)…