In this article, Carol Bostrom shares how child-led enquiry, with children choosing their own questions to research, can work in a primary classroom. Children in three year 1 classes (ages 5-6) chose three areas of their own interest or hobby and then composed three questions for investigation for each area to be used during science week. This…

There is a significant gap in the body of knowledge concerning time-compressed multimedia instruction. Although research indicates that there is no loss in learning through well-designed multimedia instruction compressed at 25%, research is lacking that analyzes the effects of time-compression with learner-control included in the multimedia…

I was tangentially aware of gifted education while I was in elementary and middle school, but my first real awareness of the concept came through my work in the University Honors Program at Texas A&M. In truth, I was not yet working for the University Honors Program; I was a graduate assistant for then-Associate Director, Finnie Coleman, who…

This exploratory study reports on how students activated learner-controlled scaffolding and navigated through sequences of connected problems in a digital learning environment. A design experiment was completed to (re)design, iteratively develop, test, and evaluate a digital version of an instructional unit focusing on binomial distributions and…

Providing students with choice can be a powerful means of supporting student engagement. However, not all choice opportunities lead to improved student engagement. Teachers can increase the likelihood that students will value choice by analyzing how students associate feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness with the choice provided them.…

Information seeking and acquisition is fundamental to learning from hypermedia, but student teachers often fail to regulate their own learning. A total of 68 students learned with either a static or a dynamic version of nBrowser, a network-based tutor that adapted recommendations of online resources to support information seeking and acquisition.…

While providing choice can be a powerful way to personalize learning for young adolescents, there is also evidence that choice can be challenging for learners. This study investigated middle school students' (N = 72) feelings about making choices in how they learn during a personalized project. Findings include students' self-reported enjoyment…

Online discussions have been proliferating in US higher education. Due to its widespread incorporation into university courses, instructors have been making efforts to design effective online discussions to enhance student learning. Ground rules play an important role in regulating student behaviors and performance in online discussions. This…

Unschooling is a form of homeschooling in which parents allow children to self-direct their education. To determine if there was any evidence of unschoolers attending to the goals of multicultural education, we conducted a content analysis of a germinal resource--the 1977-1981 issues of "Growing Without Schooling"("GWS"). Our…

Learner-centered teaching (LCT) has been found to be a more effective pedagogy for online students, as traditional teaching methods do not work well in online courses. Professors in an upper-level technology management class revised their online introductory course to incorporate cafeteria-style grading. This LCT approach allowed students to…

When the author began teaching in Paraguay, he ran into a series of classroom challenges familiar to English teachers around the world: a classroom overflowing with students, a large range of English abilities, and insufficient textbooks and traditional teaching resources. The activity described in this article is a one-size-fits-all activity that…

This article investigates how interactive representations can be used to enhance conceptual learning. It is a naturalistic study of 14 students in four groups aged 16--17 years working with an interactive simulator. The article is based on qualitative data to enable analyses of the students' processes of conceptual learning as interactive…

Research suggests that far more students are referred to developmental education courses than necessary, and that developmental education presents a barrier to students' success. As a result, many in the field have called for reforms to developmental education to address these challenges. This report documents developmental education practices…

A possible explanation for why students do not benefit from learner-controlled instruction is that they are not able to accurately monitor their own performance. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether and how the accuracy of metacognitive judgments made during training moderates the effect of learner control on performance when…

Why should teachers bother with student-driven discussions? Elizabeth A. City offers three reasons: (1) talking and thinking reinforce each other; (2) dialogue is a necessary skill of democracy, so schools should teach thinking, speaking, and listening as "practices of freedom"; and (3) student-driven talk is fun. Yet student-driven…