Biology education, like education in any other discipline, strives to make students familiar with the knowledge, activities, and ways of thinking of the community of biologists. We produced a curriculum in developmental biology based on learning through primary literature, in an attempt to develop biological literacy among highschool students.…

Explores the nature, dynamics, and implications of the Dialogic, Participator, and Experiential (DPE) approach to teaching and learning. Contrasts three dimensions analytically, and compares their interrelationships in theory and practice. Discusses three goals of the article. (Author/KDR)

In post-industrial societies saturated with the multimodal texts of consumer culture--film, computer games, interactive toys, SMS, email, the internet, television, DVDs--young people are developing literacy skills and knowledge in and for a world significantly changed from that of their parents and educators. Given this context, this paper seeks…

Space is largely ignored in both the theory and the practice of education. At the same time, however, there is an abundance of spatial metaphors that are used to describe schooling, the curriculum and educational processes. Some of these (top of the class, department) have their origins in spatial arrangements that once dominated schools and…

Both the learning organization literature and the self-managed work team literature have alluded to the potential links between teamwork and learning. However, as yet the link between these two concepts remains undeveloped. This study uses a survey of a random sample of 200 Australian organizations to empirically examine the relationships between…

Purpose: Introduces the primary concepts behind the practice of action inquiry. Then, examines what current literature suggests about components of the performance appraisal process and identifies areas where applying action inquiry concepts can add a new dimension to our current understanding. Design/methodology/approach: Applies action inquiry,…

Purpose: Many tools exist to chart the progress of an organisation in its quest to become a learning organization or achieve organizational learning. Aims to expand a tool already developed to include learning organization conditions as they occur through dialogue between individuals within an organisation with an emphasis on social learning…

Much research on reading and writing in schools continues to focus on individual cognitive skills. In contrast, investigations of literacy-learning in out-of-school settings have often taken a socio-cultural perspective, situating reading and writing in social relations and cultural institutions. The last 20 years have seen a proliferation of…

The rights of participation for children in child care programs have not received strong attention. This is because the primary purpose of such programs is not to serve the needs of children. Government in many western countries support and promote child care primarily to serve economic imperatives related to parental participation in employment.…

Troubleshooting in a practice situation requires two types of information, namely for reasoning about the problem-cause and for finding an adequate solution ("declarative information") and for manipulating the environment ("procedural information"). It is hypothesized that presenting this information piece-by-piece during practice (i.e.,…

Recent developments of e-learning specifications such as Learning Object Metadata (LOM), Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM), Learning Design and other pedagogy research in semantic e-learning have shown a trend of applying innovative computational techniques, especially Semantic Web technologies, to promote existing content-focused…

This study was aimed at clarifying relations between the way students learn and personal, contextual and performance variables. Students from seven different academic disciplines completed the Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS). Besides, data about their age, gender, academic discipline, prior education and exam performance were gathered.…

In this paper, we analyzed the descriptions of learning provided by 234 College of Education students from Finland and Canada and compared them with Whitehead's (1932/1962) epistemological theory of the rhythm of mental growth. The students were asked to "Give a concrete example of a situation in which you really learned something." The…

Three experiments were conducted that provide a direct examination of within-category discontinuity manipulations on the implicit, procedural-based learning and the explicit, hypothesis-testing systems proposed in F. G. Ashby, L. A. Alfonso-Reese, A. U. Turken, and E. M. Waldron's (1998) competition between verbal and implicit systems model.…

An eyetracking study testing D. L. Medin and M. M. Schaffer's (1978) 5-4 category structure was conducted. Over 30 studies have shown that the exemplar-based generalized context model (GCM) usually provides a better quantitative account of 5-4 learning data as compared with the prototype model. However, J. D. Smith and J. P. Minda (2000) argued…