A key factor in the transition to university is the enculturation of new students into both the discipline they are studying and effective study practices. Most significantly, students, whatever their chosen discipline, must learn to become autonomous learners. Too often this process is either left to chance or seen as a natural attribute of the…

Student learning is a complex incremental cognitive process; assessment needs to parallel this, reporting the results in similar terms. Application of fuzzy sets and logic to the criterion-referenced assessment of student learning is considered here. The constrained qualitative assessment (CQA) system was designed, and then applied in assessing a…

The focus of this article is the role of drawings in the journeys of young children towards literacy. The argument is that young children learn from home contexts a wide range of approaches towards literacy. At school their flexibility in using these approaches is reshaped into narrow versions of literacy based on learning to read, write and…

The publication and subsequent distribution and dissemination of "Birth to Three Matters, A Framework to Support Children in their Earliest Years" (DfES, 2002) marks a significant breakthrough in government recognition of the importance of the years from birth to three in shaping children's later learning. However, the Curriculum…

For the past ten years the management literature has increasingly discussed the concept of learning organizations. Yet, more that a decade later, few organizations have figured out how to create the structures and processes necessary to assure continuous learning. This article purports that this problem can be attributed to the mental models of…

People's mental models are viewed as being significant in achieving organizational outcomes, on the assumption that mental models influence people's acts. A fundamental issue in the area of organizational learning, then, is the relation between mental models, learning and performance. We contend that a fruitful line of work is to study persons as…

Building Blocks is a National Science Foundation-funded project designed to enable all young children to build a solid foundation for mathematics. To ensure this, we used a design and development model that drew from theory and research in each phase. Our design process is based on the assumption that curriculum and software design can and should…

Today, teaching and learning tend to be viewed from a constructivist perspective. Learning is regarded as a self-directed process of constructing meaning, which takes place in interaction. The teacher supports the learning process by selecting input and approaches that can scaffold the learning process and guide learners towards independent…

Evidence for the superiority of guided instruction is explained in the context of our knowledge of human cognitive architecture, expert-novice differences, and cognitive load. Although unguided or minimally guided instructional approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that these approaches ignore both the structures…

Traditional assessment methods are not always suitable for diagnosing learners' knowledge structures at different levels of their expertise. This paper describes an alternative schema-based rapid assessment technique and its application in the area of arithmetic word problem solving. The technique is based on an assessment of the extent to which…

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the debate about how to tackle the issue of "the teacher in the teaching/learning process", and to propose a methodology for analysing the teacher's activity in the classroom, based on concepts used in the fields of the didactics of mathematics as well as in cognitive ergonomics. This…

In this paper we describe a study of learning outcomes at a research-intensive Australian university. Three graduate outcome variables (discipline knowledge and skills, communication and problem solving, and ethical and social sensitivity) are analysed separately using OLS regression and comparisons are made of the patterns of unique contributions…

The research on formative assessment and feedback is reinterpreted to show how these processes can help students take control of their own learning, i.e. become self-regulated learners. This reformulation is used to identify seven principles of good feedback practice that support self-regulation. A key argument is that students are already…

This paper describes a research tool which aims to gather data about pupils' views of learning and teaching, with a particular focus on their thinking about their learning (metacognition). The approach has proved to be an adaptable and effective technique to examine different learning contexts from the pupils' perspective, while also acting as an…

This paper stems from the ESRC TLRP Learning How to Learn--in Classrooms, Schools and Networks Project, and explores how Assessment for Learning (AfL) relates, conceptually, to learning how to learn (LHTL). The term LHTL was intended to draw attention to a primary focus on learning practices, and we have related the processes of AfL to LHTL. A…