One rationale for failure to address the needs of high-ability students in schools is that high-ability students do not need special services because they do not face any special problems or challenges. A more extreme corollary of this attitude is the notion that high ability is so protective that students with high ability do not face problems or…

This paper describes a teaching method that allows for the fast and early detection of students' conceptions, misconceptions and their development. The empirical study of two examples where the method was applied is reported. The prerequisites for the efficient use of the method are discussed and results of the pilot study of its effectiveness are…

The issue of homework is now uppermost in many parents' and teachers' minds. Researchers are questioning homework's effectiveness as an educational tool. Policy makers are thinking twice about what to do about it while kids have their fingers crossed. In two national surveys conducted by the authors, they have discovered a wide range of…

This article presents a response to the paper by Li, D'ngiulli and Kendall (2007). The authors address two key aspects of this paper. The first concerns a number of errors and misconceptions in the paper that the authors think are important to clarify and correct. The second issue relates to the significant amount of research and effort that has…

One of the most colorful examples of the reflection of identities in heritage sites involves the historical U.S.-Native relationship. In exploring the topic of U.S.-Native memories, this article focuses on the cultural identities represented at the Horseshoe Bend National Military Park (HBNMP), a heritage site that commemorates the Creek War of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate students' understanding about scientifically acceptable content knowledge by exploring the relationship between knowledge of diffusion and osmosis and the students' certainty in their content knowledge. Data was collected from a high school biology class with the Diffusion and Osmosis Diagnostic Test…

This is a brief response to some of the issues raised by Gorard and Fitz in their paper, "What counts as evidence in the school choice debate?" published in the "British Educational Research Journal" v32, n6, 2006. Gorard and Fitz claim a "basic arithmetic error" (p. 807) in giving equal weighting to all LEAs (Noden,…

The purpose of this paper is to define and evaluate the categories of cognitive models underlying at least three types of educational tests. We argue that while all educational tests may be based--explicitly or implicitly--on a cognitive model, the categories of cognitive models underlying tests often range in their development and in the…

The Ancient Greeks saw the world as earth, air, fire and water. This article presents some children's ideas about what makes up the Earth. Children were asked to share what they thought the Earth was made of, how old it is, how long it took to create, and what is inside it. The answers indicate that they often have emerging though vague ideas…

Despite the ascendancy of constructivism, it seems that many, if not most, educationists in higher education and elsewhere still assume there is some transference of information to the learner from the social or physical environment, and that any process of interpretation and construction takes place after this basic information has been passively…

This article reviews the concepts and methods of Bayesian statistical analysis, which can offer innovative and powerful solutions to some challenging analytical problems that characterize developmental research. In this article, we demonstrate the utility of Bayesian analysis, explain its unique adeptness in some circumstances, address some…

An exciting element of science fairs is that they give students the opportunity to explore various interests through scientific investigation. Many students, however, mistakenly think that all investigations are experiments. This lesson can help broaden students' conceptions of science. (Contains 1 resource.)

This article reports on the results of a groundbreaking brain-imaging study suggesting that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder stems from delayed brain maturation. Implicit in some of the news coverage was the hopeful idea that many--even most--children eventually grow out of the disorder. But that's not exactly true, according to a…

How does the brain generate our experience of being in control over our actions and their effects? Here, we argue that the perception of events as self-caused emerges from a comparison between anticipated and actual action-effects: if the representation of an event that follows an action is activated before the action, the event is experienced as…

Particulate questions were used to investigate the strength of the mental association between the concept of compound and microscopic representations of molecules in students with different levels of chemistry preparation. The results have suggested that the mental association between the concepts of compound and particulate representations of…