This article presents the author's comments on the article by Keith and Ender on sociology's disciplinary core being reflected in introductory sociology textbooks. The author mentions that Keith and Ender claim that if sociology has a disciplinary core, it "would logically be located in the introductory textbook." Furthermore, since a science is…

In a classroom, a teacher attempts to convey his or her knowledge to the students, and thus it is important for the teacher to obtain formative feedback about how well students are understanding the new material. By gaining insight into the students' understanding and possible misconceptions, the teacher will be able to adjust the teaching and to…

This paper describes the methods and outcomes of a 12-year longitudinal study into the effects of an early intervention program, while reflecting back on changes that have occurred in approaches to research, learning and instruction since the preliminary inception stages of the study in the mid 1960s. We began the study to challenge the prevailing…

Deregulation and privatization of the school systems are the symptoms of the transition from the era of "massification" of education to the era of "merchandization". This process is generated by a new relation between education and the needs of the globalized economy. Education is charged to supply the economy with a skilled and flexible labour…

The aim of this paper is double. First, it provides a conceptual framework linking human resource management, organisational learning and knowledge management. Second, the paper builds a causal model and tests it with a sample of firms from the Spanish manufacturing industry, using a structural equation modelling technique. In particular, after…

Universities are encouraged to embed key skills in their undergraduate curricula, yet there is often little support on how to identify skills development and progression. This paper describes a tool that facilitates colleagues in auditing key skills and career/employability skills within individual modules and mapping these skills across degree…

The integrative studies model for classroom activities that the author proposes and illustrates in this article combines the chronological focus of traditional disciplines with the thematic orientation of an interdisciplinary approach. A theme or pattern acts as the vehicle for organization. Students are presented with a variety of information…

Piecemeal change to improve schooling is an approach that at its worst does more harm than good, and at its best is limited to creating pockets of good within school districts. When it comes to improving schooling in a district, however, creating pockets of good isn't good enough. Whole school systems need to be improved. This article focuses on…

Topic Maps, ISO/IEC 13250 standard, are designed to facilitate the organization and navigation of large collections of information objects by creating meta-level perspectives of their underlying concepts and relationships. The underlying structure of concepts and relations is expressed by domain ontologies. The Topics Maps technology can become…

This paper reports on an integration of concept mapping for manipulating and structuring knowledge with multimedia presentation technology. The intelligent hypermedia system HAN (hypermedia activated network) is an authoring environment that generates small hypermedia tutorials online as they are required. A student query activates a portion of a…

The consistent reports on gender inequity in science achievement have led to a search for more effective strategies for correcting the imbalance. This study is part of a search which sought to investigate whether or not the cooperative-concept mapping technique improves the science achievement of girls. A non-equivalent control group…

This conference report contains the following 18 papers: "State Policies and State Vocational Education Director Perceptions Pertinent to Career-oriented Education in the Middle Grades" (Barrick, Hughes); "Complying with Perkins: Using Existing Tests To Measure Academic Gains for Vocational Education Students" (Bergstrom, Gershon); "Teachers'…

This study was conducted to investigate pupil responses to lessons taught by preservice teachers, and it addresses teachers' concept mapping as related to interactive behavior or effectiveness in the classroom. Lessons taught by student teachers (N=10) were examined for what pupils thought were the lesson's key ideas and for two things pupils…

Humankind has become accustomed to reading and learning from printed books. The computer offers us the possibility to exploit another medium whose key advantage is flexibility through extensive memory, computational speed, and versatile representational means. Specifically, we have the hypercard application, an integrated piece of software, with…

This study investigated the effect of the study skill strategies of concept mapping and cooperative learning on students' academic achievement. Forty fifth grade students were placed in three groups: (1) cooperative concept mapping groups (N=9--3 students in each of 3 small groups); (2) a standard concept mapping group (N=11); and (3) a control…