Circumscribed interests are a fascinating and an understudied phenomenon in some individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Research in this area is likely to contribute to our understanding of ASDs and to advancing developmental knowledge on learning processes used to adapt to the demands of everyday social life. This study reports on a…

One of the most important questions I ask as both a cultural anthropologist and a university teacher is: How do people come to know what they think they know? In this article, I adopt a narrative approach to processes of learning and discovery in two very different locales, an indigenous society in the South Pacific, and a senior seminar on…

Two issues of this serial include the following articles: "Editorial Note for Semiotics Issue" (Pedro Portes); "Qualitative Postmodernism and the Nature of Teaching and Learning" (Gary Shank); "Instructional Prescriptions Can Be Hazardous to Your Pedagogy!" (Donald J. Cunningham, Bruce Allen Knight, and Kathy K. Watson); "Toward a Mutual Interplay…

One strategy to prevent confusion as new paradigms emerge is to have professionals in the area develop and use a standard model of the phenomenon in question. The development and use of standard models in physics, genetics, archaeology, and cosmology have been very productive. The cognitive revolution in psychology and education has produced a…

This study focuses on specific interaction behaviors rather than looking at overall levels of interaction. These behaviors can be seen as important starting points or integral components of interactive dialogue. If students perceive barriers to asking and answering questions, interaction may be seriously curtailed. The purpose of this study is to…

This paper describes the development of a diagnostic test to assess teachers' understanding of the learning cycle and highlights common misconceptions identified through the administration of the diagnostic instrument. The Learning Cycle Test was administered to 28 undergraduate students enrolled in elementary science methods who had received…

Although interactive video instruction is a powerful educational tool which provides students practical and engaging experiences in the classroom, its effectiveness depends upon its pedagogical design and strategic instructional use. In order to utilize the established advantages of interactive video instruction, instructional designers must apply…

Focusing on teachers' perspectives, this report examines sociocultural diversity and teaching by reconstructing the talk of a group of 10 teachers from the Oakland and Berkeley, California areas who met weekly for a school year. The curricular focus of the group was the teaching of writing, but over time the discussions of difference and child…

Although interviewing looks easy, it is much more complicated than it appears, and generally, students are not taught how to conduct an interview. Planning and preparation must include research about the subject of the interview and the person being interviewed. Good questions build on the question before, make the person being interviewed think,…

A 9-month naturalistic study of 16 preschoolers' classroom literacy behaviors and a related study of one student's literacy activities at home examined book-related dramatic play as an important part of the children's literacy interactions. Analyses of instances where play was related to the meanings of the books the children had read indicated…

This Digest focuses on motivating the low performing adolescent in a remedial reading or subject area classroom--the idea is that students who are disengaged from their own learning processes are not likely to perform well in school. The Digest points out that such adolescents are often caught in a cycle of failure and that secondary teachers must…

This paper describes the mental model children have of their own learning, derived from their behaviors when learning a song. The basic assumption of the study is that behavior is an outward expression of a psychological entity. The song chosen for the study was a complex, unfamiliar Zulu song. Thirty-six children in three age groups participated…

Organizational learning is fundamentally a communication phenomenon and, as such, communication research is particularly well suited to contribute to the understanding of this occurrence. Three communicative processes are constitutive of learning organizations: (1) collective thinking processes, whose three components are collectivity, idea…

In a discussion of second language vocabulary teaching and learning, the premise is that vocabulary development from context should not be used as a teaching strategy exclusive of other methods, such as direct teaching through word pair translation; rather, these approaches should be seen as complementing each other. Several arguments in favor of…

The brain's architecture serves as the basic model for theorizing about how the brain works. Current brain research confirms earlier suspicions that thoughtfulness has a great deal more complexity than the simplistic left/right distinctions of earlier research. This paper draws on the work of Carl Jung to propose the brain-psyche model as an…