No significant interaction was found between the field independent cognitive style and the level of guidance in mathematics instruction in a study involving prospective elementary school teachers. (Editor)

Eleanor Duckworth's teaching techniques, based on Jean Piaget's learning theories and the Elementary Science Study, are applied to teaching deaf students. The method calls for painstaking explorations that enable pupils to be confident they really know something and are not just parroting facts. (JDD)

A description is given of how an art teacher increased childrens' observational skills by teaching them to focus on the subtle visual details of natural objects. A brief list of helpful books is provided. (JD)

A way that allows students to discover a strategy for determining the area of rectangles, squares, parallelograms, triangles, and trapezoids is described. Students use grid paper and scissors to determine the number of square units that cover a specified space. (KR)

Discussion of basic instructional methods highlights four in particular: didactic, Socratic, inquiry, and discovery. Examples and descriptions of each method are given for elementary, secondary, and higher education; applications of each method are examined; and what teachers can do is considered. (eight references) (LRW)

Oceantides are not typically high in our consciousness here in Missouri, but in teaching astronomy and physical science the subject always comes up, and teachers of physical science and astronomy are all quite familiar with the textbook explanations. Our goal here is not to explain tides but to make some suggestions about how, on their own,…

In traditional programming courses assignments usually consist of problems that are somewhat closed in nature. That is, students are usually given a rigidly defined problem statement and are provided with a set of data that they are to use to test their program to produce a unique result. While this approach makes evaluation easy, it discourages…

This article describes a visit to the Maison des Petits school in Geneva, Switzerland where Piaget had observed young children. (PD)

This paper addresses the issue of learning to write and the need for defining a means of teaching the process of composing. Following a description of what kind of process writing is not, the composing process is presented as a continuum of making meaning out of a chaos of images, half-truths, remembrances, and syntactic fragments. The discovery…

Two sets of low-cost instructional simulation materials for use in teacher education programs were developed, one dealing with problems of classroom management and one dealing with discovery teaching. An effort was made to expose students to certain principles of classroom management or discovery teaching before they used the simulation materials.…

The discovery method, according to the author, promotes logical thinking, is motivational in nature, makes learning more permanent, produces more usable knowledge, and gets students actively involved. A discovery lesson is characterized by the following: (1) the concept to be learned is not announced, (2) experiences and activities are developed…

Describes five types of language research projects that enable students to examine language for themselves. (DD)

Humanistic educators believe that it is possible to actualize student potential, that learning environments in which children can grow are not only possible but essential. Three factors that comprise the humanistic classroom are described. (Author/RK)

Discovery and expository learning were compared in a study of independent and dependent learners enrolled in a college chemistry course. Discovery learning was found to be superior for both groups of learners, with independent students performing better than dependent students using discovery learning. (Author/DF)