The School of Education of a mid-Atlantic region, graduate-only Christian institution sought to build a cohesive, indigenous conceptual framework to assure that school instruction and scholarship were aligned with university and school foundational documents, especially the mission and vision statements. A visiting professor was engaged to…

The objectives of this study were to: examine the potential interaction between students' epistemological beliefs and placement in a simulation condition (constructivist versus non-constructivist) on conceptual development; and to assess whether a constructivist computer simulation experience would result in a greater degree of conceptual change…

This paper establishes environmental attitude, a construct in environmental psychology, as a powerful predictor of ecological behavior. Based on Ajzen's theory of planned behavior, this study uses a unified concept of attitude and a probabilistic measurement approach. Questionnaire data from members of two ideologically different Swiss…

Explicit representation of relations plays some role in virtually all higher cognitive processes, but relational knowledge has seldom been investigated systematically. This paper considers how relational knowledge is involved in some tasks that have been important to cognitive development, including transitivity, the balance scale, classification…

This ERIC Digest discusses concept mapping, a technique for representing the structure of information visually. Concept mapping can be used to brainstorm, design complex structures, communicate complex ideas, aid learning by explicitly integrating new and old knowledge, and assess understanding or diagnose misunderstanding. Visual representation…

This study examined how engaging calculus students in Writing to Learn Mathematics affected the types of conceptual and procedural errors that the students made on their examinations. Students in two sections of an introductory college calculus course in Fall 1994 were the respondents in this study. A classification system was developed that…

The purpose of this study, unique in that it centered on students as creators rather than users of programs, was to determine whether collaboratively creating HyperCard stacks that presented information on four decades (i.e, the 1920s, the 1930s, 1945-60, and the 1960s) affected the amount of knowledge and the interrelatedness of informational…

The networking procedure is explored as a way to describe and measure cognitive structures. A research project at Gottingen University (Germany) tried to operationalize economic contextual knowledge as a qualification for teaching in commercial (business) education. Networking was examined as a way to measure this knowledge. Each student should…

This paper is intended to provide the instructional technologist already possessing some understanding of expert systems with some insight into two of the many steps involved in the design and production of such systems: knowledge acquisition and knowledge structuring or representation. It is also intended to help technologists to see how they…

This article tells the story of how the Ball-Stick-Bird reading system, intended for superior dyslexic students, was applied to the teaching of reading to individuals with severe to moderate mental retardation. The system incorporates developmental linguistics to make story reading easier for the beginning student. The first books of the series…

Therapy provides a useful model for teaching critical thinking by placing thinking processes in the context of the whole person. Critical thinking is grounded in the language skills of the student as the student attempts to construct a structure of reality that is well-adapted to the student's relational contexts. The didactic model of teaching…

The two-part activity outlined in this paper reveals to undergraduate students that assumptions made in theory building remain unquestioned until one steps outside the initial realm of expectations, and that theories adopted have a demonstrable impact on behaviors. Part I defines a theory, describes the roles of assumptions and knowledge in…

A factor analysis study provided empirical evidence of the validity of the modified Mathematics Self-Efficacy Scale (MSES) and its three subscales: mathematics problems self-efficacy, mathematics tasks self-efficacy, and college courses self-efficacy. The MSES was administered to 522 undergraduate students from three state universities and…

A study compared the literary response and character attribution processes of 40 undergraduate students on the basis of differences in their interpersonal construct repertoire, or "interpersonal cognitive complexity." No studies to date have explored the ways in which cognitive complexity influences readers' overall responses to…

This paper introduces successive and coordinate intellectual thinking skills, using concepts as a best case example. The attributes and optimal presentation requirements of successive and coordinate concepts are reviewed, and types of errors commonly associated with successive and coordinate skills are delineated. The effects of both of these…