A good question is one of the most important tools in a staff developer's repertoire. Questions that cause thinking can produce more learning than telling. This paper describes how to develop questioning skills using word banks and scaffolds. It explains why mediative questions are important and which mediative questions are the most valuable. (SM)

Examines how secondary school students in Singapore construct knowledge through reading and understanding their science textbooks in an attempt to discover whether early or later pedagogic interventions in the learning process are more helpful. (Author/VWL)

Describes the Creative Thinking in Technology (CTT) program in which creative thinking is presented as a synthesis between lateral thinking and vertical thinking. Analyzes student projects in light of this definition of creativity, and explores the role technology can play in developing students' higher order thinking skills. (Contains 37…

An instructional program designed to help middle school students with severe learning disabilities learn about story themes, and focused on enhancing ability to generalize to themes not included in the instruction, was evaluated. Findings indicate students with learning disabilities can profit from instruction geared toward abstract higher order…

Recent research on the brain has identified a number of cognitive strategies for constructing knowledge and improving retention of new information. Classroom teachers have begun implementing many of these strategies in their teaching, but what about library media specialists? As leaders and learners in the Information Age, library media…

Tools for measuring cognitive engagement within online groups have been concerned only with measuring an individual participant's cognitive engagement, without any concern for measuring cognitive engagement within groups. There remains a serious need for a scheme that measures cognitive engagement of groups and the validation of such a scheme…

In this commentary, we utilize a social cognitive view of self-regulation to analyze the computer-based learning environments (CBLEs) that are described in the various articles in this volume. Although these CBLEs are creative ways of engaging students' metacognitive processes, their impact on students' motivational beliefs and self-reactions has…

This chapter highlights the central role of experience in learning and consciousness; it also outlines experience-based instructional processes that adult educators can use. (Contains 1 figure.)

The overlap of cognitive principles and inherently motivational strategies used to increase memory retention can be seen in reading, writing, and math. These are just of the few principles and corresponding strategies described in this report that can be used to increase academic motivation as well as increased cognition -- strategies that are…

This article discusses situated cognition research and its impact on literacy studies concepts and instruction. It provides a brief historical comparison of cognitive psychology and situated cognition and emphasizes the importance of understanding the complex relationships that exist between learners, the settings in which they engage in cognitive…

The purpose was to examine the effect of Brain Gym on learning the overhand throw among 42 first grade students. Participants from two intact classes were randomly assigned to an experimental or control condition. Students were tested before and after a 5-week intervention using the object control subtest from the Test of Gross Motor Development-2…

The purpose of this study was to identify the most effective model presentation format in behavior modeling to teach interpersonal skills in online learning environments. Four model presentation formats were compared; video, pictures plus audio, audio only, and text-script only. The effects of the model presentation were investigated in terms of…

This article discusses five papers focused on "Research on Reasoning about Variation and Variability", by Hammerman and Rubin, Ben-Zvi, Bakker, Reading, and Gould, which appeared in a special issue of the "Statistics Education Research Journal" (No. 3(2) November 2004). Three issues emerged from these papers. First, there is a link between the…

Many educators today have been unpretentious about regarding mainstream thought as the supreme channel through which knowledge is disseminated. This may be the product of minds that appreciate the mainstream's intellectual contribution, positively or otherwise, to humanity. However, the growing cultural diversity of the United States makes it…

This paper examines two very different approaches to dance training, ballet technique and the somatic discipline of Topf technique ("TT"). It explores and evaluates the application of TT to ballet training. Initially, what is meant by the term "mind/body connection" is discussed, and then the paper examines, in a theoretical and a practical sense,…