A red sphere is seen at the bottom of a sealed glass tube filled with a colorless, transparent liquid. Holding the tube for a short period makes the sphere rise slowly from the bottom until it finally floats on the surface of the liquid. Instructions for preparing the demonstration are given, together with an explanation of the phenomenon. A…

This brief outlines nine leading research-based concepts that have served as a foundation for education reform. It compares existing ideas about learning, knowledge, and teaching with conceptual benchmarks for "best practice" that would be consistent with current research. The goal is to foster inquiry and support fundamental, long-term…

This innovative book about organizational learning in K-12 settings reshapes the way teachers and administrators think about people, practices, and policies while providing a compelling roadmap for transformation from within today's school systems. The authors argue that six interrelated conditions support organizational learning: prioritizing…

Markets or market-like mechanisms are playing an increasing role in higher education, with visible consequences both for the regulation of higher education systems as a whole, as well as for the governance mechanisms of individual institutions. This article traces the history of economists' views on the role of education, from Adam Smith, John…

Insects are a natural choice for studying behavioral ecology in the classroom--they are easy to obtain, maintain, and manipulate. Unlike competition and predation, however, the concept of group living does not translate well to small-scale experiments involving only a few individuals. How can inquiry be used to examine why animals live in groups?…

This article presents an activity for early-in-the-year parents' night. The beginning of a new school year is an exciting time. The authors, as teachers, like to capture that excitement by engaging their 10th-grade biology students in an inquiry project demonstrating the nature of science and scientific inquiry. They developed the Next Step…

This article talks about leading significant learning opportunities through conflict of ideas in a school system. Catalyzing school change can turn emotional differences of opinion into learning opportunities. Leaders who want to deal effectively with these challenging, often tense situations need to be more than good managers. They need to be…

Our role as teachers in universities should not be to simply keep up-to-date with new technologies; rather, we should be leaders in the use of new and emerging technologies to effectively meet the changing needs of learners. (Contains 1 figure.)

The recent promotion of inquiry-based learning techniques (Uno, 1990) is well suited to the use of animals in the classroom. Working with living organisms directly engages students and stimulates them to actively participate in the learning process. Students develop a greater appreciation for living things, the natural world, and their impact on…

There is increasing agreement among those who study classrooms that learning is likely to be most effective when students are actively involved in the dialogic coconstruction of meaning about topics that are of significance to them. This article reports the results of an extended collaborative action research project in which teachers attempted to…

In early intervention, researchers often are interested in interpretation aids that can help determine the relative importance of variables when multiple regression models are used, and that facilitate deeper insight into prediction dynamics. Commonality analysis is one approach for helping researchers understand the contributions independent or…

This article focuses on a qualitative teacher research project with a fourth-semester university Spanish class that emphasized inquiry-based learning. One of the primary objectives of the class was to increase learner autonomy through self-selected inquiries, self-directed learning activities, and curricular negotiation. Multiple data sources were…

The curriculum is packed with so much content that teachers resort to telling students what they know and students simply commit facts to memory. The packed curriculum leaves little time for students to acquire a deep understanding of the subject or to develop life-long skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, and communication. However,…

Eila Burns undertook the enquiry that is the subject of this article while studying for her MEd degree at the University of Birmingham. She is now a lecturer in teacher education at Jyvaskyla University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The project she describes here aimed to assess the effectiveness of peer tutoring and the advantages of the…

It is argued that learning and instruction could be conceptualized from a process-analytic perspective. Important questions from the field of learning and instruction are presented which can be answered using our approach of process analyses. A classification system of process concepts and methods is given. One main advantage of this kind of…