A simple, but useful, handout given to mothers of young children can greatly increase the likelihood that they will present aspects of emergent literacy in their homes. The concept of emergent literacy states that all literacy learning begins in infancy and proceeds forward from that point, and that all of the literacy skills of oral language,…

This book is the fourth in a series aiming to promote international exchange of ideas, experiences, and studies relating to technical and vocational education. The introduction reviews traditional practices in assessment and chapter 2 highlights the connections between assessment and learning, emphasizing that assessment is the most significant…

This paper attempts to create a vision of what it would be like to teach for understanding, to adopt the view of learner as constructor of his or her own understanding, and to share in the creation of an environment for reconstructing students' understanding and reasoning. Such a program is based on assumptions about the cognition of learners,…

A model, derived from the literature, is presented of the influence of learners' preconceptions on the amount of mental effort invested in learning from television. The proposed model suggests that learners' preconceptions are influenced by the characteristics of the media, the characteristics of the task, and the characteristics of the learner.…

Many preservice teachers confront their own lack of confidence and actual mathematics phobia for the first time in their math procedures classes. This study was designed to explore the application of a confluent education intervention, a model based on the premise that all learning is accompanied by an affective as well as a cognitive component,…

An ethnographic study conducted in Hong Kong investigated commonalities in Chinese and English that might be used to elicit prior learning in the first language to enhance learning in English as a Second Language (ESL), for both language and content area instruction. Specifically, it: (1) examined Hong Kong students' exposure to and interaction…

A study analyzed think-aloud protocols to investigate and describe what readers who are developing proficiency do as they read. Subjects, three sixth-grade middle-school boys (with grade point averages of 3.0-3.5 on a 4-point scale) from a small West Virginia suburb, read aloud 16 text sections (from one to four sentences in length), thought aloud…

This case study examined how three white preservice teachers were similar and dissimilar in terms of their racial attitudes and beliefs, their prior interracial experiences, and certain personal characteristics. Participants had taken a multicultural education course and had been part of a larger study of teacher candidates' attitudes about…

This paper describes an introductory teacher education course designed to challenge prospective teachers' beliefs about schooling, teaching, and learning, formed as a result of personal experience. The instructor encountered problems in attempting both to engage his students' existing beliefs about teaching and learning and to encourage their…

This study investigated the influences of prior life and employment history on the thinking and practice of beginning, second-career elementary and secondary school teachers. Data were drawn from classroom observations, journal writing, and open-ended informal interviews; case studies were then developed illustrating the impact of personal and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate some variables that relate to students' anxiety in learning statistics. The variables included sex, class level, students' achievement, school, mathematical background, previous statistics courses, and race. The instrument used was the 24-item Students' Attitudes Toward Statistics (STATS), which was…

This study provides a description and analysis of how teachers read research in light of prior beliefs about what research is and how it should influence teaching. Attention to teachers' beliefs has become an essential feature of studies designed to help understand research. The beliefs on which researchers and teacher educators typically focus…

A number of strategies, informed by science education research, have been identified to assist the understanding and communication of difficult concepts in science. A teacher's craft lies in creating learning experiences that facilitate concept development and challenge misconceptions from which students actively build, modify, and extend their…

A discussion of language testing looks at the relationship between the processes of language learning and language testing, particularly from the point of view of pragmatics theory. It outlines some of the theory of Charles Sanders Pierce and its role in the evolution of linguistic theory, as well as the work of other theorists concerning the…

Instructional simulation is a type of computer assisted instruction that is effective for teaching dynamic skills. Control of instructional simulation may be fully automated (computer control), assigned to learners (learner controlled instruction), or control may be shared between computer and learner (learner control with advisement). The…