As a learner, researcher, and educator, Kripa Sundar has depended on concept maps to become more intentional with her time and to better understand topics. Why? Her top two reasons are their efficacy across subjects and age groups and their versatility in application. In this article, she delves into what concept maps are, why they are effective,…

Generative learning strategies are intended to improve students' learning by prompting them to actively make sense of the material to be learned. But are they effective for all students? This review provides an overview of six popular generative learning strategies: concept mapping, explaining, predicting, questioning, testing, and drawing. Its…

Traditional module delivery in higher education often follows a linear structure, which is not always conducive to understanding concepts and the many possible relationships between them. In this paper we introduce an online visual interactive learning resource called ViLO designed to address this problem. We describe the principles guiding the…

Learning-by-teaching has been identified as one of the more effective approaches to learning. Recently, educational researchers have investigated virtual environments in order to utilize the learning-by-teaching pedagogy. In a face-to-face learning-by-teaching situation, the role of the learners is to teach their peers or instructors. In virtual…

The first PhD thesis in the field of Chemistry Education at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Novi Sad, was defended in 1992. This can be regarded as the symbolic dawn of Chemistry Education as a scientific discipline in this region. After the official breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, research that had started in the…

The Larnaca Declaration on Learning Design arose from a 2012 meeting of experts in Larnaca, Cyprus who sought to provide a new theoretical foundation for the field of Learning Design, based on a synthesis of research and practice in the field to date. It begins by acknowledging the vast benefits that would arise from wider sharing of effective…

What is environment? The answer to this question is fundamental to how we teach environmental studies and sciences (ESS). We follow recent scholarly literature in approaching environment as connection, not as some category of reality, and consider pedagogical implications via concept mapping, a new learning technology. Concept maps potentially…

The San Jose State University Electrical Engineering (EE) Department implemented a skill audit exam for graduating seniors in 1999 with the purpose of assessing the teaching and the students' mastery of core concepts in EE. However, consistent low scores for the first years in which the test was administered suggested that students had little…

This article presents KnowledgePuzzle, a browsing tool for knowledge construction from the web. It aims to adapt the structure of web content to the learner's information needs regardless of how the web content is originally delivered. Learners are provided with a meta-cognitive space (e.g., a concept mapping tool) that enables them to plan…

In education business, proper interaction is a crucial factor for learning effectiveness. However, it is difficult to successfully guide the participants to achieve the appropriate interaction in an online learning environment. That is, the interaction as well as internal dialogue should be systemically performed under a valid control. In this…

The process of transforming students from novices into experts relies on active learning and the development of an appreciation for the links among topics. Since rote or stimulus-response learning is preferred by a majority of students who are beginning their programs of study but does not optimize learning and understanding, the first step in the…

Multiuser virtual environments (MUVEs) like Second Life present unparalleled opportunities to help students connect knowledge by description to knowledge by experience; in a MUVE, students can experience phenomena rather than only reading about them. Baba Kofi Weusijana, Vanessa Svihla, Drue Gawel, and John Bransford describe their use of a maze…

Although most instructors would like to believe that their students fully understand every biological concept explained in class, this is often not the case. Gary Wisehart, chair and professor of biology at San Diego City College, knows this from firsthand experience. "Students get very good at telling you what you want to hear," he says, "so it…

The ability to comprehend trophic (nutritional) relationships and food web dynamics is an essential part of environmental literacy. However, students face severe difficulties in grasping the variety of causal patterns in food webs. We propose a curriculum for comprehending trophic relations in elementary school. The curriculum allows students to…

In the 1990s, courses on sustainable development (SD) were introduced in technological universities. After some years of practice, there is increased interest in the evaluation of the most effective ways for teaching SD. This paper introduces the use of conceptual maps as a tool to measure the knowledge acquired by students when taking a…