In this study, the explanations of two classes of 10-year old children about what happens to the food that they eat were explored, particularly in the context of theories about the development of children's concepts of the human body. These ideas were investigated in a number of ways: obtaining children's own writing and drawings; semi-structured…

In the following article the author presents a methodological framework for the teaching of intercomprehension. Competence in intercomprehension is seen as a realisation of the general human faculty for using and understanding language, which includes the ability to comprehend texts and utterances in "unfamiliar" languages. This competence can be…

Gifted students are often described in the literature as being self-regulated, self-directed learners. Ten gifted primary students were interviewed in order to clarify the concept of self-directed learning in students of primary age. The students provided information on their knowledge of self-directed learning, explanations of the self-directed…

When students are working with hand held technology, such as graphics calculators, we usually only see the outcomes of their activities in the form of a contribution to a written solution of a mathematical problem. It is more difficult to capture their process of thinking or actions as they use the technology to solve a problem. In this paper we…

This article argues that children in a particular virtual community are learning through their participation in the discursive and social practices of the community. Using Wenger's model of "communities of practice" the article illuminates examples of children's learning that were a direct result of collaboration towards a common goal.…

The author details a Perkins Grant-funded project of the Medical Education Center at Northern Virginia Community College that is designed to increase student retention by teaching students to identify and to use their learning style preference(s). (Contains 1 chart.)

The influence of social relationships, positive interdependence, and teacher structure on the quality of partner reading interactions was examined. Partner reading, a scripted cooperative learning strategy, is often used in classrooms to promote the development of fluent and automatic reading skills. Forty-three pairs of second grade children were…

Problem-based approaches to learning have a long history of advocating experience-based education. Psychological research and theory suggests that by having students learn through the experience of solving problems, they can learn both content and thinking strategies. Problem-based learning (PBL) is an instructional method in which students learn…

In this study, we defined and quantified the degree of cognitive conflict induced by a discrepant event from a cognitive perspective. Based on the scheme developed, we investigated the relationship between cognitive conflict and conceptual change, and the influences of students' cognitive characteristics on conflict in learning the concept of…

Though the concept of online community has been heralded as a promising tool to support teacher professional development, a robust and meaningful definition remains elusive. This review draws together research on community, teaching, and learning in traditional and online settings. Examples of current efforts in the field of online learning…

In this essay, the author argues for a democratized way of developing a consciousness of differences by describing two abbreviated creative writing classroom experiences with urban sixth grade middle school students during the 2002-2003 academic year. She draws on Tony Medina's (2001) claim that poetry and writing weave people and worlds together…

A distance education system may be viewed in terms of intrapersonal and interpersonal instructional dialogues that mediate the learning and instructional resources that enable such dialogues. Instructional resources include self-instruction texts, tutorial sessions, instructor availability, Web sites, and more. This study investigated the kinds of…

This study aimed to verify the efficacy of a strategy for science learning acquisition based on contextual, metacognitive and socio-cultural perspectives, strongly linked to the paradigm of conceptual change. The teaching model we adopted is based on co-operation for the realization of scientific experiences, and included direct observation, pair…

Paired listening was originally developed as a research tool with the aim to understand the strategies used by L2 learners when listening to recorded speech in the target language. It offers researchers a useful combination of direct observation and verbal data, whilst avoiding the common drawbacks of subjective introspection. This paper examines…

This study deals with the demand of a task. A theoretical background shows the difficulty of applying the idea of demand (as established in the literature) to the data. This has been confirmed in the preliminary study of this paper, which deals with the analysis of university examinations. Some factors that affect the demand of a task have been…