Describes the R2D2 (Reflective, Recursive Design and Development) model of constructivist instructional design. Highlights include participatory teams; progressive problem solution; phronesis, or contextual understanding; dissemination, including summative evaluation; and a new paradigm that shifts from the industrial age to the information age.…

In a 7-week project, teams of elementary students designed and made a coal cart. The project demonstrated that practical design and technology problems are best broken into manageable subtasks. Doing so enhances understanding of conceptual and procedural knowledge. It also showed how children can be moved toward more expert levels of performance.…

Describes a business data generator to assist instructors in generating realistic business data in great volume for teaching and learning activities. Illustrates how the software application allows instructors to manipulate parameters to customize the data to reflect problem situation. (Contains 40 references.) (JOW)

Presents findings from four problem-based research sites, exploring theory generation and practice improvement in the context of how mental health service users become positioned. Interview and observation data highlight an exclusion of service users that perpetuates fragmented delivery and response. The article shows that problem-based and action…

Presents ideas regarding instructional design project management for performance technologists that are likely to increase client satisfaction. Topics include a project kickoff summary; maintaining communication, including submitting reports, talking to the client, addressing problems quickly, and follow-up; and closing the project effectively.…

Proposes a metatheory of problem solving. Describes differences among problems in terms of their structured ness, domain specificity (abstractness), and complexity; describes individual differences that affect problem solving; and presents a typology of problems, each of which engages different cognitive, affective, and conative process and…

Presents a divisibility problem and how a class of students discussed the problem and determined a plan to solve it. (ASK)

This article presents a summary of research, development, and applications of Creative Problem Solving (CPS) in educational settings and, more specifically, in gifted education. The CPS framework is widely known and applied as one important goal in contemporary gifted education, as well as in relation to initiatives for "teaching thinking" in the…

This review of recent literature, focusing on the integration of mathematics and reading, highlights three reading stances within mathematics classrooms. The first stance, reading problems, highlights the scope-and-sequence, transmission approach to learning mathematics, where the purpose of reading is to figure out how to solve an immediate…

This article addresses how to help students develop an aptitude for seeing relationships between elements and puzzling out new forms in doing so. Four different approaches are presented. Each illustrates a way that industrial designers work in considering the form of a product. A classroom activity is included.

Recent educational computer-based technologies have offered promising lines of research that promote social constructivist learning goals, develop skills required to operate in a knowledge-based economy (Roschelle et al. 2000), and enable more authentic science-like problem-solving. In our research programme, we have been interested in combining…

Even for those passionate about both cricket and maths, each can have their dull moments. This article brings together the sometimes-dry binomial distribution with a problem of cricket matches where the result of the series has already been decided, and so are "dead". It is hoped that readers will become more interested in at least one…

This paper takes up the question of the way in which "the problem with educational research" is represented. It takes as its point of departure two recent views on "the problem"--one expressed by an educational journalist and one presented by the Australian Council of Deans of Education. It locates these within a larger frame…

Mathematical language and chemical knowledge are complementary to each other and only productive use of the two enables using numbers to gain solutions rather than just answers. It is believed to be important in the understanding of science that students feel free to speak mathematics and only a few of them are willing to connect and use their…

Mathematical problems when solved with different approaches deepen the understanding of topics learned. It is reported that weighted average is commonly used in applications and the relationship between all the ratios involved in the problem emphasized could be learned from Farey sum of two fractions.