External representations have a great impact on what and how students learn. One key manner in which environments can operate upon novices' knowledge is through helping them ground their problem solving in an understanding of the situation embodied by the problem. In this paper, students' difficulties in microeconomics problem solving were…

The inability of schools to promote students' thinking is currently the subject of a great deal of attention. Teachers' point of view with regard to teaching thinking has been missing in this attention. This study was undertaken to investigate teachers' attitudes toward teaching thinking. A questionnaire was distributed to 600 public elementary…

Calls for the unification of mathematics education research have been made from many pedagogic perspectives, particularly with respect to the need for raising dynamic models that bridge the learning-teaching gap and that portray the ways that the meanings of specific mathematical procedures and concepts are constructed within individual…

The use and analysis of student generated propositions linking two scientific concepts (photosynthesis and respiration) were examined before and after the study of photosynthesis. A proposition-generating task (PGT) was used as a diagnostic tool to indicate student misconceptions and partial understandings. Focus was on determining: how the nature…

This final report of the Group Errorless Teaching Strategies Research Project is organized by the project objectives and covers planned and actual activities and outcomes. Objective 1 involved a review of the literature related to teaching students with mild and moderate mental handicaps in group settings and resulted in three articles which…

Stressing that learning to write is learning to think, a series of workshops showed teachers in the content area how to use writing in their classrooms. Following a brief introduction to the program, workshop participants developed eight guidelines for creating effective writing assignments: (1) make all assignments worthwhile, (2) make them…

Prepared as part of a series applying recent research in oral and written communication instruction to classroom practice, this booklet describes five situations where writing and speaking experiences are used as a way to learn subject matter. The first section of the booklet describes the learning that takes place in the home, where writing and…

A report provides summaries of 10 papers presented at a conference about teacher competence and effectiveness. In the first session, two speakers, Nel Noddings and Edward R. Fagan, present an analysis of the prevailing rhetoric in educational discourse and practice. The second session provides historical perspectives on the use of the term…

Over the last decade, the development of computer software and hardware directed toward education and the teaching and learning process has had tremendous impact on course delivery (Glahn and Gen, 2002; Katz, 2003). During this period, higher education has been witness to fundamental changes from courses delivered in the traditional face-to-face…

This study examined the relative effectiveness of different types of computer feedback (both corrective and noncorrective) on student achievement. A total of 41 students in grades 9 and 10 comprised the two treatment groups. The subjects all interacted with a computer program written by the researcher. The first treatment group received corrective…

Only by examining the way teachers actually use instructional time and engage students in the teaching-learning process can educators gain a clearer understanding of student learning. A critical examination of students' opportunity to learn should include the goals a teacher holds for students and the tasks assigned, the teaching methods utilized,…

The elementary social studies curriculum should be restructured in a way that promotes a broader study of people, places, and events that are distant in space and time. The "Expanding Horizons" framework guides social studies curriculum in New Brunswick, as well as in many other Canadian provinces and the United States. It emphasizes moving from…

Despite a long-standing commitment to citizenship education throughout the United States, relatively few researchers have examined what civic learnings are acquired from particular topics in the curriculum such as the Revolutionary era. Researchers have largely neglected the substance of classroom life, the specific curricular context and subject…

This book is the result of the accumulated research of five researchers from the United States and Australia on a school in Coastal Australia. The research team shared a constructivist epistemology and interpreted the qualitative and quantitative data collected over a 10-week period in two classrooms from that perspective. Each chapter discusses…

The best way to teach writing is to make it the way to learn something else. Instructors need to look at written communication as it is used in real life. When students take pains with their writing, it is because what they have to say is important to them. The students' need to communicate a particular meaning for a particular purpose guides them…