Action research places a powerful tool for school improvement in the hands of teachers. By highlighting the outcomes that are possible and presenting clear steps in the research process, this book is one to encourage anyone who is seeking to implement evidence-based school improvement. Eileen Piggot-Irvine uses her Problem Resolving Action…

Before leaders in technology education are able to identify a theoretical framework upon which a curriculum is to stand, they must first grapple with two opposing views of the purpose of technology education--education for all learners or career/technical education. Dakers (2006) identifies two opposing philosophies that can serve as a framework…

Decades have been spent studying training transfer in organizational environments in recognition of a transfer problem in organizations. Theoretical models of various antecedents, empirical studies of transfer interventions, and studies of best practices have all been advanced to address this continued problem. Yet a solution may not be so…

Web-based self-management interventions (W-SMIs) are designed to help a large number of chronically ill people become more actively engaged in their health care. Despite the potential to engage more patients in self-managing their health, the use of W-SMIs by patients and their clinicians is low. Using a self-management conceptual model based on…

The purpose of this technical report is to describe a research study exploring students' cognitive processing while solving problems related to division of fractions. Four students were interviewed using verbal protocol techniques with the intention of better understanding their cognitive processing when dividing fractions. Information gained from…

Objective: Faculty development has increasingly become a focus in medical education. Many models are employed around the United States. The authors present a group model process developed to train new educators to teach our medical students. Methods: The authors met monthly with a diverse faculty over the past 4 years and interacted in a…

This paper studies three models for cognitive diagnosis, each illustrated with an application to fraction subtraction data. The objective of each of these models is to classify examinees according to their mastery of skills assumed to be required for fraction subtraction. We consider the DINA model, the NIDA model, and a new model that extends the…

New technology-enabled assessments offer the potential to understand more than just whether a student answered a test question right or wrong. Using multiple forms of media that enable both visual and graphical representations, these assessments present complex, multistep problems for students to solve and collect detailed information about an…

For the past few years, virtual environments (VEs) have gained broad attention from both scholarly and practitioner communities. However, in spite of intense and widespread efforts, most VE-related research has focused on the technical aspects of applications, and the necessary theoretical framework to assess the quality of interfaces and designs…

Including gesture in instruction facilitates learning. Why? One possibility is that gesture points out objects in the immediate context and thus helps ground the words learners hear in the world they see. Previous work on gesture's role in instruction has used gestures that either point to or trace paths on objects, thus providing support for this…

This study investigates fourth-year pharmacy students' experiences of problem-based learning (PBL). It adopts a phenomenographic approach to the evaluation of problem-based learning, to shed light on the ways in which different groups of students conceive of, and approach, PBL. The study focuses on the way students approach solving problem…

Response to Intervention (RtI) offers a comprehensive model for the prevention of delays in learning and behavior. While this problem-solving framework was initially designed for application within Kindergarten to 12th grade programs, there is substantial research that supports the value of the model for application within early childhood…

Despite student interest, the heart is often a poorly understood topic in biology. To help students understand this vital organ's physiology, the author created this investigation activity involving the mammalian heart and its role in the circulatory system. Students design, build, and demonstrate working artificial "hearts" to exhibit what they…

This paper presents the IPS-I-model: a model that describes the process of information problem solving (IPS) in which the Internet (I) is used to search information. The IPS-I-model is based on three studies, in which students in secondary and (post) higher education were asked to solve information problems, while thinking aloud. In-depth analyses…

Theories that explain the gender discrepancy in mathematics almost universally explain why boys are "better at math" than girls while failing to adequately account for girls' higher grades in math classes or better performances on tests of computational ability. This article develops a new, more comprehensive theoretical model that explains girls'…