In mainstream education, the transition from primary to secondary school ("school transition") is difficult for children with autism spectrum disorder, being marked by high levels of emotional and behavioural difficulties. The Systemic Transition in Education Programme for Autism Spectrum Disorder (STEP-ASD) is a new, manualised school…

The effectiveness of problem-based learning (PBL) in terms of increasing students' educational attainments has been extensively studied for higher education students and in nonexperimental settings. This paper tests the effectiveness of PBL as an alternative instruction method in secondary education. In a controlled experiment at the class level,…

This study explored the nature and basis of teachers' concerns regarding several behavioural and social difficulties experienced by their secondary-school students. It was hypothesized that teachers would be most concerned about students presenting externalizing behavioural or academic difficulties but not those displaying internalizing problems.…

A new computerized environment introducing a variety of metacognitive support mechanisms (MSMs) in different phases of the problem-solving process was designed to influence students' transfer from solving structured problems (near transfer) to solving open-ended problems (far transfer). Two hundred and thirty one students (aged 13-14 years) were…

Concluded that studies of coaching for the Scholastic Aptitude Test were methodologically flawed but that some definite regularities could be identified. These regularities indicated size of score effects was related to amount of student contact time in coaching programs. (Author/DB)

This paper presents the results of part of an investigation carried out with fourth-level Spanish secondary education students (15 years old), in which we implemented a teaching unit based on problem-solving methodology as an investigation to teach genetics and human inheritance curricular contents. By solving open problems, the students…