Debunks seven myths: vocational students are low achievers, they do not pursue higher education, voc ed does not help academic competence, it does not make a difference in the labor market, vocational students are economically rich and psychologically poor, student employment engenders poor work attitudes, and voc ed is a poor investment. (SK)

There are two disparate school reform movements in the United States: the politically driven America 2000 tied rhetorically to the national interest, international competitiveness, and corporate health; and grassroots movements to decentralize authority, establish ungraded schools, and improve instruction. Top-down, politically driven national…

Excoriates Gerald Bracey's "broadsides" against the author's own article in same "Educational Leadership" issue for misinterpreting his conclusions and methodology. Stevenson's learning gap results did not oversimplify ability-effort relationship in U.S. and Asian students; results were similar for U.S. cities with both large…

A discussion of what E=mc2 means and other issues associated with the equation are presented. The differences between matter, mass, and energy, a derivation of the equation, the history of the word mass and examples of how it is used, misconceptions surrounding the equation, and a discussion of uranium fission are included. (KR)

Fear frequently underlies confusion about shared decision making. Participative decision makers do agree on three basics: focus on improving school effectiveness by involving teachers and parents; need for school teams or councils charged with decision-making authority over certain issues; and a process to improve overall decision-making quality…

Expands upon the popular belief that mirrors cause the left-right reversal of objects placed in front of them. The image-location rule and image-symmetry rule are applied throughout the article to help summarize some important properties of mirror images. (ZWH)

Testing using the Golden State Examination, a performance test that employs a variety of testing modes, revealed that students share several misconceptions in biology and chemistry. Some of these misconceptions are shared in this article. (ZWH)

High school chemistry students' (n=183) applied and theoretical knowledge of dissolution, diffusion, effusion, and states of matter were compared. Study found that students' formal reasoning ability and their preexisting knowledge are associated with their conceptions and use of particulate theory. A significant difference between applied and…

Semistructured interviews with 15 masters-level biology students revealed that most proposed deterministic explanations of evolutionary processes, ignored the role of chance, seemed unaware of debates over deterministic versus probabilistic models of evolution, and confused evolutionary theory (a model) with the actual complex processes it…

The challenge of education is to preserve the imagination, questioning, and theoretical stance of a five year old, but gradually replace unfounded prejudices and mind-engravings with more accurate theories, ideas, conceptions, and stories. Correct test answers seldom signify genuine understanding. Gardner's book "The Unschooled Mind"…

Investigated was whether preservice teachers' success in solving division word problems was effected by the type of problem or by the common misconceptions related to primitive models of division. Preservice teachers' ways of thinking about division were also examined. Sample division problems, results, discussion, and implications are included.…

Progress toward rural development has been hampered by flawed views of rural America; serious limitations to existing social and economic data on sparsely populated areas; treatment of rural America as a geographical entity unconnected to the larger U.S. economy and society; perceived lack of feasible political solution to rural problems; and…

Children often confuse what is said and what is meant in referential communication. Four experiments sought to determine exactly what is confused by children through the use of stories containing informative, contextually informative, and ambiguous utterances. Children tended to be insensitive to utterance ambiguity, not understanding the variable…

Two experiments explored the tendency of preschoolers to map novel nouns and verbs onto unfamiliar rather than familiar objects or actions. This disambiguation effect has been interpreted as evidence that youngsters expect object or action labels to be mutually exclusive. The effect was stronger for object than for action words. (MDM)

This review of literature focuses on three decades of research related to precollege student understandings about the nature of science. Although the majority of studies show that student understandings are less than desirable, there is research that indicates that student conceptions are acceptable. (PR)