This is the story of a course in higher education that, over a period of ten years, went from being one of the most popular courses, among both students and teachers, to becoming one of the more problematic. Students and teachers felt that the course had many problems that needed to be addressed. For the course round of 2022, the decision was…

Building on the framework presented in the best-selling "Creating Cultures of Thinking," Ron Ritchhart's new book, "Cultures of Thinking in Action," takes the next step in helping readers not only understand how a culture of thinking looks and feels, but also how to create it for themselves and their learners. Arguing that no…

The purpose of this comparative, longitudinal case study was to explore the distance operations system implemented in U.S. colleges and universities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Embedded in a larger two-year study of distance education in the U.S. before and after the health crisis, this study combined a grounded theory methodology with a…

In the current society, boredom has a bad reputation. Among others, one reason is that boredom is a negative predictor for cognitive performance due to the detrimental effects on attention and engagement. Recently, however, the negative reputation has been challenged by studies showing that boredom seems to promote creativity. However, those…

A truism of school reform has long been the promise that technology, properly applied, will fuel dramatic improvement in teaching and learning. When tech-enabled schools or online learning programs haven't delivered the hoped-for results, some have dismissed these shortcomings as implementation problems--or evidence that we haven't yet deployed…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore students' perceptions to changes to the learning environment of their undergraduate physics laboratories, in which their scientific inquiry processes were stimulated. Design/methodology/approach: The activities students engaged in were redesigned to reflect a guided inquiry approach and to…

School transitions and educational innovations confront students with changes in their learning environment. Though expectations are known to influence perceptions and motivation, which, in turn, influence the effectiveness of any situation, students' expectations for a new learning environment have received little attention. This longitudinal…

The purpose of this mixed method, Case Study research was to explore the teacher's perceptions, efficacy, and belief systems. The researcher using a primary survey and a collection of secondary extant data endeavored to uncover the teachers' responses for efficacy, beliefs and perceptions of student achievement. The Effective Schools (Edmonds,…

The central problem that American education poses for society is that the enterprise is appreciably underproductive when judged against standards and requirements of the postindustrial era. This generic problem will not be appreciably ameliorated until the instructional system design (ISD) process is better understood and explicated and then made…

This paper addresses the problem of how school environments can be restructured to address the key requisites of cognitive development for all children. Following the problem statement, the second section discusses the historic concerns related to restructuring and the research underlying them--the roots of the cognitive revolution, the…

Using cognitive science as a lens, this report identifies serious problems with most learning situations, maps the design principles for more effective learning, and shows how these principles relate to four policies and programs: integrating academic and vocational education, work-based apprenticeship, tech prep and 2+2, and cooperative…

Maintains that Canadian scholar, Kieran Egan, developed a schema of childhood development that presents a bold, new approach to the stages of growth, both affectively and cognitively. Describes Egan's views and how the school curriculum must be adapted to correspond more closely to these views. (CFR)

This report describes the growth in cognitive skills and achievement, and the continuities and discontinuities experienced in school and at home by the eighth-grade cohort of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88) during the 2 years between the study's base year (1988) and the first-followup (1990) surveys. The report examines…

While education is a key to any development strategy, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) is the master key that can transform the world of work and the economy, alleviate poverty, save the environment and improve the quality of life. As students are being prepared to become efficient, skillful and competent workers, they can at…