Discusses obstacles teachers face in learning about and integrating new technology into the classroom, including lack of time, availability of resources, and lack of incentives. Recommends a systems approach to overcome obstacles and provide viable professional development to motivated teachers that will influence their ability and willingness to…

Suggests that technology education standards will initiate changes and are a first step in guiding the improvement of educational programs and classroom practices. (JOW)

Complexity theory is used to describe how workplace leaning occurs within a system of interactions and relationships. The learning system of a school-as-workplace is examined to understand the relationships, disequilibrium, and engagement that occur in a learning community. (SK)

As a commentary on the Special Issue, this paper discusses recent advances in the study of change across several time scales. It points out the importance of specifying time scales and putative patterns of change when characterizing problem behavior over developmental time scales. Methods for studying risk and protective mechanisms through…

Until the early 1980s, most researchers paid little attention to sibling relationships. Studies of mothers dominated the research agenda, to the almost total exclusion of fathers, extended families, and siblings. Although in early classic studies of families of children with disabilities, investigators embraced a family systems approach that…

Traditional approaches to cognitive development concentrate on the stability of cognition and explain that stability via concepts segregated from perceiving acting. A dynamic systems approach in contrast focuses on the self-organization of behavior in tasks. This article uses recent results concerning the embodiment of cognition to argue for a…

Within the last 20 years, transitions in the conceptualization of emotion and its development have given rise to calls for an explanatory framework that captures emotional development in all its organizational complexity and variability. Recent attempts have been made to couch emotional development in terms of a dynamical systems approach through…

Educators and psychologists are concerned about problem behavior. Fortunately, effective interventions and practices have been documented for addressing this problem behavior. However, sustained and expanded uses of these interventions and practices have not been consistent or widespread. One promising approach to the systemic and sustained…

Career development is regarded as a lifespan process; however, the career development of children has received little theoretical and research attention. This article reflects on the breadth and depth of understandings about children's career development from the metatheoretical perspective of the Systems Theory Framework of career development…

Purpose: The purpose of this action research is to gain insight into how people learn to think systemically. An examination of the themes that emerged from this action research will be undertaken. Design/methodology/approach: An action research approach was adopted which involved the collection and reading of 120 journals that were kept by…

An important objective of science and technology education is the development of pupils' capacity for systems thinking. While in science education the term system relates mainly to structures and phenomena in the natural world, technology education focuses on systems designed to fulfill people's needs and desires: examples include systems to…

Developmentalists are generally interested in systems perspectives and this is reflected in the theoretical models of the past decade. However, the methodological tools to test these models are either nonexistent or difficult for many researchers to use. This article reviews the state space grid (SSG) method for analyzing synchronized event…

Universities today are increasingly being viewed in terms of serving the purpose of economic development. This paper postulates that their chief purpose is to advance knowledge and that in doing so they effectuate regional economic growth and development through processes specified in the endogenous economic growth model. To achieve this purpose…

Since its first publication more than 15 years ago, the Systems Theory Framework (STF) has become an established metatheoretical framework in the international career development literature. Ten years into its history, the first review of its development was published. The present article overviews the expansion of the STF literature since that…

In this article, the author discusses how an instructional leader can overcome organizational inertia and create a genuine systemic change by starting small. To make a successful change, an organization must do the following: (1) Find the right staff and a powerful idea; (2) Provide a sponsor; (3) Start small; (4) Get results; (5) Find a…