Introduction: While there is a general agreement on the theoretical importance of epistemological beliefs, the research area is struggling with the measurement of these beliefs. In this contribution, the use of drawings to ascertain epistemological beliefs is explored. Method: Three studies are described. In Study 1, we asked participants to draw…

In this article, the author describes how her eleventh- and twelfth-grade portfolio class used art as a social concern through a sketchbook and a linoleum print. Students thumbed through copies of the "New York Times" to find an article that described a modern-day social concern. Students were assigned to choose an article, summarize it, and come…

The world's population is growing by about 80 million people a year, implying an estimated increased freshwater demand of about 64 billion cubic meters annually (World Water Assessment Programme, 2009, Water in a Changing World: United Nations World Water Development Report 3, Chap. 1, p. 3-21). Groundwater depletion, which reduces the amount of…

The Draw an Engineer Test (DAET) is a common measure of students' perceptions of engineers. The coding systems currently used for K-12 research are general rubrics or checklists to capture the images presented in the drawing, which leave out some of the richness of students' perceptions, currently only captured with an accompanying student…

How is the natural environment in the neighborhood representative of the larger biosphere in which people live? Studying the local birds and flora of the Pacific Northwest in the context of the local parks and ponds provided a rich opportunity for third-grade students at St. Thomas School in Medina, Washington, to explore and learn about…

The objective of this exploratory study is to characterize by means of drawings if the developmental patterns in the graphic representation of organ and organ systems progresses related to age of participants. Secondly, whether there is an integration of sex organs into the internal body image. The drawings representing the inside of the body in…

This article describes a collaborative action research project that followed two teachers and their students in a primary school in the Paro valley of Bhutan as they began to implement the Project Approach and promote children's use of visual representation. The article begins with a description of the primary education system and teacher…

Many studies in the chemical education literature report students' alternative conceptions in chemistry and the difficulty they present for future learning. In this paper, we review existing diagnostic tools used to uncover students' alternative conceptions in chemistry and suggest that there are two fundamental issues with such instruments,…

Environmental education researchers have called for a greater analysis of "learning" in environmental education in relation to contemporary theories and explanatory frameworks of learning. Situated learning, as a prominent example, is a sociocultural theory that contends that learning is a social process that occurs as individuals…

This paper reports the findings from an experimental study based on the pretest posttest research design that studied mental rotation (MR) and spatial visualization (SV) training outcomes and their impact on orthographic drawing performance. The sample of the study comprised 98 secondary school students (36 girls, 62 boys, Mage = 15.5 years, age…

A quasi-experimental action research with a pretest-posttest same subject design was implemented to determine if there is a different effect of the flash card method and the multisensory approach on kindergarteners' achievement in sight word recognition, and which method is more effective if there is any difference. Instrumentation for pretest and…

Over-reliance on prescriptive pedagogies, such as explicit instruction, could hamper students with learning difficulties from sense-making and thus limit their acquisition of conceptual understanding. To help them in constructing mathematical knowledge, manipulative and drawing could be used to solve problems in a meaningful context. Using a case…

The benefits of drawing for children are wide-ranging but are likely to be mediated by the art curriculum and other governmental guidance to teachers relevant to drawing/art. Furthermore, such statutory regulations vary between cultures, and therefore curricula represent an important influence on the cultural differences found in children's…

An emphasis on scribbles and drawing as important brain-building behavior makes this book's Neuroconstructive theory of child development and Scribbling/Drawing/Writing practice unique. A child's brain builds itself in response to genetics, DNA codes, and the environment. One of the pre-determined ways a child's brain naturally builds itself is by…

Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), author of "Out of Africa," said, "God made the world round so people would never be able to see too far down the road." The author embraced this wonderful thought by venturing on a three-week journey to Kenya and Tanzania in search of grand adventure. In this article, the author shares her adventure…