Surveyed 48 social-work doctoral-program directors about the inclusion of philosophical issues in the curriculum. The survey asked about traditional and emergent epistemologies, including heuristics, social constructivism, and other forms of postmodernism. Results suggest that while such content is included in research courses, directors face…

Critically analyzes an article by Jan Klabbers, focusing on methodological, epistemological, and ontological viewpoints. Examines the reasoning process whereby the actor approach model of learning environments is derived from the machine approach model; looks at claims of differentiation between rationalism and historicism, and the distinction…

Presents a cultural-developmental framework for the analysis of children's mathematics in collective practices and illustrates the heuristic value of the framework through the analysis of videotaped episodes drawn from a middle-school classroom. Discusses the promise and limitations of the framework as a method for furthering understanding of the…

An "ill-defined" informal performance task was constructed to evaluate secondary students' problem solving in mathematics. The task for 170 students in grades 9 and 10 was to evaluate other students' solutions to two mathematics questions. Higher-achieving students generally preferred responses reflecting multiple approaches to problem solving,…

Used the multicomponent latent trait model (MTLM) (S. Embretson, 1980, 1984) for 3 different synonym tasks completed by 212 and 257 Belgian secondary school students. Developed a heuristic evaluation procedure that tested features of the model and provided an explanation for why the MTLM did not fit the data. (SLD)

This study was an exploration of the extent to which higher education tutors' perceptions of assessment were consistent with the construct of authenticity. Depth interviews with 12 academics sought views on what might constitute desirable assessment tasks and scoring methods to use with students. Summaries of transcribed interviews suggested that…

Goldstein and Gigerenzer (2002) [Models of ecological rationality: The recognition heuristic. "Psychological Review," 109 (1), 75-90] found evidence for the use of the recognition heuristic. For example, if an individual recognizes only one of two cities, they tend to infer that the recognized city has a larger population. A prediction…

The recent growth of Jewish day schools in the United States and United Kingdom has consistently been attributed to the declining appeal of public education among minority groups in general and the Jewish community in particular. In this article I review the interpretative heuristic that lies behind this claim, and ask whether this heuristic…

For this study, we examined the cogency, comprehensiveness, and viability of team-based problem solutions of a Web-based hypermedia case designed to promote student understanding of the practice of instructional design. Participants were 14 students enrolled in a graduate course on advanced instructional design. The case was presented to students…

Superior detection and rejection of 1 versus another class of items during recognition is called the mirror effect. Some mirror effects may involve strategic criterion adjustments based on item distinctiveness and its relation to memorability. Three experiments demonstrated mirror effects for known versus unknown scenes and 1 suggested a similar…

In his book entitled "Teaching Defiance: Stories and strategies for activist educators," this author asserted that, although his book was not a discussion of the Iraq war, it was concerned with the way the war has been "waged" in the countries of the three invaders: the USA, the UK and Australia. For him, the fact that each…

Arguments between response to intervention (RTI) with curriculum-based measurement (CBM) and traditional, individual psychoeducational assessments encourage a false dichotomy between alternatives that are not mutually exclusive, but complementary. This article discusses strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, touches on current legislative…

The role of assessment is central to the current work in the field of self-regulation research, to the conceptualizations derived from empirical work, and to the operationalisation of its concepts in individual and classroom implementations. The various instantiations of the concept of self-regulation, all presuppose a detailed accounting of many…

It has recently been determined that generating an explanatory hypothesis to explain a discrepant event is important for students' conceptual change. The purpose of this study is to investigate how students' generate new explanatory hypotheses. To achieve this goal, questions are used to identify students prior ideas related to electromagnetic…

The purpose of this conceptual analysis is to investigate how contemporary video and computer games might inform instructional design by looking at how narrative devices and techniques support problem solving within complex, multimodal environments. Specifically, this analysis presents a brief overview of game genres and the role of narrative in…