How can educators engage students in learning, thinking, and inquiring? One consideration is teaching with a set of two contradictory texts--texts that have some contradiction between them. The authors find that when students read these books in tandem, they show an innate response of actively wanting to learn, think, and inquire in powerful ways.…

Purpose: Being "literate" is well established as key to active civic participation, right from the earliest years of life. Young children's natural curiosity and motivation to understand the world and their places within it through playful explorations offers rich opportunities for learning. Reported here are findings from a STEAM…

This study's general theme revolves around practical work in chemical education, and its scope is the employment of a novel inquiry strategy combined with a new openness level. We investigate how the controlled positive error, a new device for inquiry activities developed by us, affects undergraduate students' experience of an experiment and…

The main purpose of the study is to gain insight on to what extent taking a science methods course correlated with the science teaching pedagogical preferences of pre-service science teachers. The study recruited twenty K-8 teacher education students enrolled in lower division science courses at a large American public university, some of whom had…

The purposes of this study were to (1) investigate 127 high school students' views about scientific inquiry at different grade levels, and (2) to describe factors such as the teacher's views about scientific inquiry, his teaching, and his curriculum that facilitated or constrained students' views about scientific inquiry. The majority of students…

This interpretive multiple-case study examines the practices and perspectives of four mid-level and secondary world language teachers in diverse teaching contexts as they design and implement critical content-based instruction units in their classes. Knowing that content can be defined as either cultural or academic content (Spenader, Wesely,…

As a contribution to the scholarship of teaching (Boyer, 1990), the author conducted a self-study of praxis (Kemmis & Smith, 2008) to identify and describe how certain pedagogies help students meet "stage one" challenges in doctoral education (Lovitts, 2001) at one university. Findings from a literature review identified the…

In this report, we argue that some of the most productive and edifying kinds of literature discussions among certain ages/grade levels may be best understood as "mangles of practice" (Pickering, 1995). Mangles of practice involve the coalescence of planned and contingent forces, and they produce emergent or self-organizing…

This dissertation describes and analyzes the work of a semester-long teacher research study of inquiry-based and reflective teaching and learning strategies and their impact on students' preparation for future learning. I explore relevant scholarship on knowledge transfer, classroom ecologies, and student agency to set the stage for a discussion…

Development of pedagogies within schools that inform adolescent learning has been an ongoing struggle within education systems. A novel approach to this issue was taken by the Non Government Organisation (NGO) "Evolve" based in Victoria, Australia, who worked in partnership with disadvantaged secondary schools to develop a multi-faceted…

It is widely acknowledged that multimodal digital texts support student engagement with ideas, knowledge and new forms of literate practice. With this in mind, an interdisciplinary team at The University of Melbourne collaborated to create a digital resource--"The Venom Patrol" website--to teach scientific concepts about Australia's…

The author of this paper suggests several neoteric, unconventional, idiosyncratic, or unique approaches to beginning Set Theory that he found seems to work well in building students' introductory understanding of the Foundations of Mathematics. This paper offers some ideas on how the author uses certain "unconventional" definitions and…

Article focused on the teaching behaviors which facilitate successful student inquiry. (Author/RK)

The purpose of this research was to analyze the effects of a teaching methodology on the question-asking behavior of elementary school children. A fifth grade social studies class was chosen as the site of this experiment. The teacher, aided by two interns, divided the class of 24 into three equal groups. The group controlled by the teacher was…

Contends that history is a discipline with a great potential which could be exploited in the service of art education. Proposes that this potential be tapped by extending our notions of the educational functions of history and our conceptions of what past events might be seen as historically significant, and by learning to recognize historical…