Traces the decline of rhetoric and the underlying social changes that hastened its fall from grace. Argues the need for a reconstructed rhetoric. Creates a context for considering a visual rhetoric. Suggests that abstraction and scientific reductionism fail to address issues of human agency. Cites five examples of social or cultural problems that…

Includes a dandelion poem that is designed to stimulate elementary students' creativity and abstract-thinking skills. Offers several exercises to go with the poem: creating mental pictures, drawing first images, and performing for better understanding. A reproducible for creating a dandelion-shaped poem is included. (SM)

Describes an earlier study on the main characteristics and background of undergraduate students' difficulties when trying to solve mathematical tasks. Focuses on and extends part of an earlier study that concerned task solving strategies. Indicates that focusing on what is familiar and remembered at a superficial level is dominant over reasoning…

Describes a framework for identifying and classifying students' alternative conceptions and unscientific patterns of reasoning within a particular scientific domain. Provides a basic system for indicating how much researchers know about students' non-scientific conceptions and reasoning. Suggests how the framework may prove useful for…

Interviews 120 children in kindergarten and grades 2, 4, and 6 with five Piagetian tasks to determine the grade level at which most have constructed transitive reasoning, unit iteration, and conservation of speed. Indicates that construction of the logic necessary to make sense of the measurement of time is generally not complete before sixth…

Two experiments with children five and eight years of age examined the effects of different types of similarity on analogical problem solving and explored the cognitive components responsible for these effects. Results indicated that superficial and structural similarity facilitated the process of drawing analogies. (WJC)

Articulates and operationalizes a framework for investigating the level of quantitative literacy in the United States. Uses data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to document the level of quantitative literacy in the U.S. Indicates that students fall short in their understanding of the nature of mathematics and the…

The Test of Nonverbal Intelligence-3rd Edition (TONI-3) and the Analogic Reasoning (AR) subscale of the Universal Nonverbal Intelligence Test (UNIT) were administered to 35 individuals with autism to determine whether real-world-knowledge deficits affected intelligence scores. The 2 tests are similar in format; however, the TONI-3 includes only…

This paper describes the effects of learning support on simulation-based learning in three learning models: experiment prompting, a hypothesis menu, and step guidance. A simulation learning system was implemented based on these three models, and the differences between simulation-based learning and traditional laboratory learning were explored in…

A commonly accepted definition of online learning is that students have access to learning experiences in: time, place, pace, learning style, content, assessment, and pathways (Chen, 2003). Although this is true, there is a considerable concern about the level of abstraction involved in online education. Critics of flexible learning call it just…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present an exploration of parents', teachers' and children's perspectives on children's understanding of wellbeing with the aim of illuminating and comparing the conceptualisation of wellbeing from these three perspectives. Design/methodology/approach: The participatory method developed to undertake the…

Mental-content verbs such as "think," "believe," "imagine" and "hope" seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different,…

Previously, we proposed a model of student reasoning which combines the roles of representation, analogy, and layering of meaning--analogical scaffolding [Podolefsky and Finkelstein, Phys. Rev. ST Phys. Educ. Res. 3, 010109 (2007)]. The present empirical studies build on this model to examine its utility and demonstrate the vital intertwining of…

The findings of this study indicate that students can be taught to avoid specified verbal operations which block problem-solving processes without detriment to the processes themselves. (RC)

Validity of the Attitudes Toward Work and Money Questionnaire as a predictor of vocational adjustment for mentally retarded adults who were clients of an intensive rehabilitation program was assessed. (Author/RC)