'Scientific Investigation' was the first of the four Attainment Targets which prescribed the science component of the national curriculum in England and Wales in 1991. Following a brief historical account of the origins of scientific investigation as a curriculum objective, this paper comments upon the attempt by the central government to define a…

Howard Gardner (1993) identified seven areas of intelligence: verbal/linguistic, logical/mathematical, visual/spatial, musical, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. At the elementary school level, he emphasized using an evaluation specialist, a curriculum developer, and a school-community worker to coordinate and harmonize…

Recent decades have brought to the fore a coalition of writers on education who identify themselves as postmodernists, a designation that encompasses such vaguely allied groups as critical educators, radical educators, feminists, postcolonialists, anti-imperialists, poststructuralists, postpositivists, and neo-Marxists. A common characteristic…

This paper examines linkages between educational philosophy and classroom activities and presents 10 guidelines for early childhood teachers and administrators to effectively strengthen these linkages. The 10 guidelines are: (1) each child has a capacity to respond to what the teacher brings to the classroom; (2) educators need to open the world…

The gap between the theory of democracy and its practice is nowhere more evident than in the classroom, where the teachers charged with transmitting democratic values to the next generation of citizens can only repeat democracy's failures. Some people would like to separate liberalism from the concept of democracy, since they believe that the…

A study was conducted of nurse educators in Canada involved in distance education to determine their perceptions of the unique role of teachers in the distance education teaching/learning process. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were held with 21 nurse educators with a range of 4 to 28 years teaching experience and 2 to 16 years experience…

A working definition of critical thinking is needed to guide teachers to encourage their students to think critically and to coach them as they proceed. Constructing a working definition involves first identifying certain assumptions that, when taken collectively, may be incompatible with an effective definition of critical thinking. Among these…

A teacher's search for a coherent explanation for the resistance of students to high school literature programs, vitally important since student attitudes influence learning, resulted in a discovery of both external and internal causal factors. Externally, an increasing emphasis on competency testing hinders the fostering of lifelong literacy.…

The future role of the social sciences in educational administration theory is explored in this paper. First, the turn toward the social sciences in educational administration is considered. Attacks by the subjectivist and critical theorists on positivistic science are examined next, with attention to the decline of those two views in sociology…

Michael Oakeshott, an English political philosopher, wrote extensively about education and how people learn political skills. Much of what he wrote may have interesting implications for instructional systems design. This paper is an explication of two aspects of Oakeshott's writings. The first deals with the nature of knowledge and its…

Critical thinking is currently a prominent issue in education. For business educators, four issues must be considered: the meaning of critical thinking, how critical thinking can be introduced into the curriculum, how critical thinking is developed in courses, and how critical thinking can be evaluated. The literature identifies three theoretical…

There is an urgent need for young people to learn to know the natural world of which they are a part. Outdoor education is the only means by which people can recover their stone-age identity and discover that they are wildlife, no different in the basics of life than any other species. For most of their story, human beings lived in harmony with…

Many of the best nonfiction writers violate punctuation rules frequently enough to indicate that the rules neither tell very well what to do nor inform very accurately about what is done. An examination of 18 prominent authors' use of the entire hierarchy of punctuation marks shows disagreement and inconsistency among the writers concerning…

This paper examines a typology of metanarratives in educational administration. "Metanarratives" represent "a global, overarching, encompassing set of rules that tell us...the necessary and sufficient conditions for the constructs we use and how to use them." From this perspective, logical positivism is considered one of the…

This book is an analytic and critical treatment of Paulo Freire's philosophy. Its two central theses are that Freire's thought is best understood as that of an educational practitioner and theorist and that the most fruitful interpretation of Freire comes from understanding him as a Catholic thinker. Chapter 1 situates Freire's lifelong work in…