Principals play a unique role in school and student outcomes. This paper presents findings of a study that explored how principals' leadership behaviors influenced teachers' sense of efficacy. Specifically, the paper describes how principals in three middle schools influenced teachers' sense of efficacy and affected instructional and school…

This is a step-by-step guide to designing problem-based learning across the curriculum. Contents show teachers how to develop student-centered, problem-based curriculum, manage student projects across a range of subjects and disciplines, assess projects using portfolios, and involve community members as project mentors. Numerous examples are…

Over the last 15 years or so, research into measurement error has begun to consider not just whether the test items fit, but whether the people who answer the items fit. Attempts to systematically identify people who do not fit the typical pattern have led to several "person-fit statistics." This digest describes the need for such…

To examine the relationship among the Principles of Adult Learning Scale (PALS), Educational Orientation Questionnaire (EOQ), and Philosophy of Adult Education Inventory (PAEI), the three instruments were administered to 111 graduate adult education students. The instruments had similar purposes: PAEI measured philosophical orientation relative to…

Recently, psychologists have investigated self-efficacy as it relates to teaching and learning. This study used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM)--a powerful new technique for assessing multilevel data--to examine the effects on self-efficacy of a school-wide effort to value task-mastery and learning over relative ability and competition. The…

Cognitive theory and research are relevant to vocational education. Three theoretical perspectives underlie cognitive theory-based curriculum and instruction: information processing, knowledge structure, and social history. A review of these perspectives in vocational curriculum and instruction suggests that instruction supporting higher-level…

The question of why some second language learners are more successful than others is examined from two different approaches. One looks at the social distance between the speakers of the target language and the learner's native language and, on one hand, the resulting learner and target-language-speaker attitudes and, on the other hand, the type…

A model, derived from the literature, is presented of the influence of learners' preconceptions on the amount of mental effort invested in learning from television. The proposed model suggests that learners' preconceptions are influenced by the characteristics of the media, the characteristics of the task, and the characteristics of the learner.…

Many women in two-year colleges are returning to education after having been away from a school setting for an extended period of time. In a community college writing class, written comments to a teacher on the first day of class indicated that women were considerably less self-confident than the men, with several revealing fear of expressing…

An approach to teaching problem-solving based on using the computer software Mathematica is applied to the study of electrostatics and is compared with the normal approach to the module. Learning outcomes for both approaches were not significantly different. The experimental course successfully addressed a number of misconceptions. Students in the…

This paper presents four philosophies of science teaching for teachers to use that encourage optimal learner achievement. Information is provided on an experimentalist or problem solving approach, an idealistic or subject-centered science curricula, a decision-making approach, and criterion-referenced procedures for learning. Two psychologies of…

This paper reviews four decades of research on race and education in Great Britain and discusses the deficit theories of underachievement that serve as the structure of most of the studies. Focus is placed on black youth of Caribbean origin and how they perform in British schools. Consideration is also given to constructive frameworks from gender…

The paper briefly discusses pedagogical theory underlying the application of cooperative learning strategies in postsecondary environments and describes specific cooperative pedagogical strategies. Most of the paper consists of descriptions of the following exemplary cooperative learning techniques, with supporting data when available: (1)…

This monograph sets forth a theoretical basis for advocating a program of disciplinary arts education as an integral part of general education from kindergarten through grade 12. The title, "The Role of Imagery in Learning," indicates the centrality of aesthetic perception of images. To make the case, it is necessary to show by analysis,…

This paper discusses the central thesis that new research on estimation and mental computation will benefit from more focused attention on the situations in which they are used. In the first section of the paper, a brief discussion of cognitive theory, with special attention to the emerging notion of situated cognition is presented. Three sources…