Critiques two popular and current perspectives on the nature of understanding in science education, and offers a competing perspective drawing from Dewey, aesthetics, and aesthetic experience. Uses aesthetic understanding as an analytic lens to critique and illuminate the learning of three students studying geology in a fourth-grade classroom.…

Discusses reflective journals as a way for student teachers to evaluate their own learning in a constructivist learning culture. Demonstrates how students integrated intellect and affect and gained insights about themselves and their ways of thinking and knowing. (Contains 27 references.) (SK)

Three studies investigated whether and under what conditions the addition of on-screen text would facilitate the learning of a narrated scientific multimedia explanation. The overall pattern of results can be explained by a dual-processing model of working memory, which has implications for the design of multimedia instruction. (Author)

Recognizes the essential role parents play in teaching and learning, the importance of developing both compassion and intelligence, and a shared responsibility for creating a more equitable world. Focuses on two sets of written conversations that parents and children created after reading texts about civil rights and human rights. (SG)

Investigated effects of inferential questioning, and of the timing of such questioning, on narrative comprehension by 4th, 7th, and 10th grade students and college students. Results indicate that as reading and language skills become more proficient and automatic, inferential questioning increasingly directs readers' attention during reading to…

Current reform efforts are politically inspired, fragmented, unsystematic, atheoretical, and costly. They ignore developmental limitations to student achievement. This article uses Piaget's cognitive notion of development and behaviorist principals of instructional design to support the existence of qualitative and quantitative limits to student…

Three "Handbook" chapters on school leadership responsibilities conclude that educational administration is a field where people can make a difference. Research provides firm indications of what administrators should or should not do. Constructivist teaching, teacher development, and school improvement are part of the larger challenge of…

By their very nature, grades undermine learning. In schools that constantly emphasize the importance of success, students may regard learning as a chore, avoid challenging tasks, think superficially, and value ability more than effort. Students should be able to think, write, and explore without worrying how good they are. (MLH)

Tests the hypothesis that an early adolescent brain growth plateau and spurt exists, and that this plateau and spurt influence students' ability to reason scientifically and to learn theoretical science concepts. Finds that measures of students' (n=210) prefrontal lobe activity correlated highly with scientific reasoning ability, and that these…

Discusses how online approaches can provide students with greater degrees of personal control over learning in ways that support deep learning. Reports on the use of a commercially produced online learning environment in a United Kingdom university undergraduate course and outlines future developments that support the didactical approach…

Reports results of a collaborative study of mathematics instruction in 1st and 5th grade students in Korea. Lessons consisted of sequences of highly organized, systematic patterns of instruction dominated by teacher questions that included higher level procedural and conceptual questions. Observations have implications for educators interested in…

In three sixth-grade classrooms, students' independent writing activities and interviews were analyzed to identify affective links to prior experience that were used in students' knowledge construction efforts. Learner-centered teacher strategies related to classroom dialogue and activity choice can increase affective/emotional affordances in the…

Points out the difficulties of student assessment based on classroom participation and recommends a rubric. (YDS)

Discusses cultural discontinuities that affect learning effectiveness revealed by the increase in globalization of distance education. Considers the theoretical basis of such discontinuities, describes a study of West African extension students and print-based instructional materials, and suggests implications for instruction and research as well…

Discusses the impact of the World Wide Web in terms of epistemology. Topics include technological innovations, including new dimensions of virtuality; the accessibility of information; tracking Web use via cookies; how the Web transforms the process of learning and knowing; linking information sources; and the Web as an information delivery…