This article describes a study into the role of heuristic support in facilitating discovery learning through simulation-based learning. The study compares the use of two such learning environments in the physics domain of collisions. In one learning environment (implicit heuristics) heuristics are only used to provide the learner with guidance…

What, if anything, do teachers need to know about how the brain works to improve teaching and learning? After all, a plumber needs to know how to stop leaks--not the molecular structure of water. And one can learn how to use a computer without knowing how a computer chip works. Likewise, teachers need to know how to help students develop…

Ten years after the groundbreaking "From Barbie to Mortal Kombat" highlighted the ways gender stereotyping and related social and economic issues permeate digital game play, the number of women and girl gamers has risen considerably. Despite this, gender disparities remain in gaming. Women may be warriors in "World of…

The purpose of this study was to experimentally test the influence of computer-mediated word-of-mouth communication (WOM) on student perceptions of instructors (attractiveness and credibility) and on student attitudes toward learning course content (affective learning and state motivation). It was hypothesized that students who receive positive…

"Metaphor: Theory and Practice," a senior/graduate seminar taught at Loyola Marymount University, was something of an experiment. Its goal was to engage students in theoretical explorations of metaphor, in analysis of metaphor growing out of those theories, in the creation of their own metaphoric texts, and finally, in the development of…

Many teachers and administrators have recognized that problem solving and reasoning represent two of the primary goals in the education of children. In order for teachers to achieve these goals, they must have appropriate materials available to them. This book includes materials to help teach and assess problem solving and reasoning. The first six…

Three procedures for evaluating the replicability of descriptive discriminant analysis (DDA) results are discussed. The techniques include cross-validation, the jackknife, and the bootstrap. Discriminant analysis is a multivariate technique used when group membership or classification is the focus of the analysis. DDA is used to describe major…

The modern history of biology shows how Darwin's selectionist theory has replaced instructionist theories in explaining the operations of living things: first with inheritance through the gene pool of the 1850s, and second with the replacement of a template theory of immune system function in the 1960s. Today scholars in several disciplines…

This book addresses different types of thinking, including critical, creative, and analytical, and presents a variety of problem-solving strategies, along with specific ways they can be taught to students. The main emphases of the book are thinking and mathematics, problem solving, and the application of computational skills. The problem-solving…

This essay demonstrates how social cartography--the writing and reading of maps addressing questions of location in the social milieu--may enhance social research and move it forward in its struggles to distance itself from the positivistic restraints of modernism. Social cartography suggests an opening of dialogue among diverse social players,…

This paper explains how Q-technique factor analysis can be used to identify types or clusters of people with similar views. Q-technique factor analysis can be implemented with commonly available statistical software such as the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The paper addresses three questions: (1) How many types (factors) of…

The recognition that all parametric methods are interrelated, coupled with the notion that structure coefficients are often vital in factor and canonical analyses, suggests that structure coefficients may be important in univariate analysis as well. Using a small, heuristic data set, this paper discusses the importance of structure coefficients…

One solution to the problem of getting expert knowledge into expert systems would be to endow the systems with powerful learning procedures that could discover appropriate behaviors by observing an expert in action. A promising source of such learning procedures can be found in recent work on connectionist networks, which are massively parallel…

Following a brief discussion of the lack of definition and cohesion in the social studies and the curriculum, the paper argues that the reflective inquiry rationale has had the most significant influence of all the alternative rationales for the field and its curriculum. The paper presents its case in four basic sections. The first section,…

When the term "problem" is defined as a task requiring analysis and reasoning toward a goal, it is seen that the performance of the problem solver is narrowly delimited by the domain, form, and complexity of the problem and the characteristics of the solver. Tenets of a unified theory of problem solving are discussed, concerning what the…