This article examines three conceptual reforms in US teacher education (competency-based teacher education (CBTE), reflective teacher education (RTE) and constructivist teacher education (CTE)) for their effects on the education of multicultural, multilingual youth, as well as considering alternative certification (AC), known here as an…

Increasingly, autistic students are attending college, posing new challenges to writing instructors. In particular, such students may have trouble imagining readers' responses to their texts. Developing an appropriate pedagogy for these students may involve revisiting composition studies' tradition of cognitive research, while not abandoning more…

This article addresses the perennial issue of the criteria by which qualitative research should be evaluated. At the present time, there is a sharp conflict between demands for explicit criteria, for example in order to serve systematic reviewing and evidence-based practice, and arguments on the part of some qualitative researchers that such…

With increasing numbers of students learning science through a second language in many school contexts, there is a need for research to focus on the impact language has on students' understanding of science concepts. Like other countries, Brunei has adopted a bilingual system of education that incorporates two languages in imparting its…

I report on benefits from 26 teacher-participant evaluators of a computer game designed to motivate learning and to ease conceptual understanding of biology in South Africa. Using a developmental, social constructivist and interpretative model, the recommendation is to include the value systems and needs of end-users (through social dialogue);…

Students (N = 124) viewed 14 timed Web pages that distinguished 14 confusing word pairs. In a 2 x 2 factorial design, the authors gave all of the students matrices containing representational pictures for each pair of words, as well as examples of each word in use. One factor in the design was the absence or presence of rules of usage for each…

Teacher educators have suggested that mentoring has the potential to help novices learn to teach in reform-minded ways. This suggestion implies a change in the nature of mentor-novice relationships as conceptualized in the existing literature and an understanding of the complexities of mentoring relationships. Based on critical constructivist and…

The late Donald C. Stewart's assertion that "the era of the cognitive psychologists is waning; the era of the social constructionists is just beginning" drew attention to a major ontological and epistemological shift in composition studies. This shift demanded a methodology to accommodate it. Some composition researchers have considered…

The relative cognitive requirements and benefits of learning from non-contrived experience and information presentation is considered. The advantages and costs are contrasted with contrived experience and information-reduction that are features of instruction. An overview is given of one method of viewing the relationship between experience and…

The opinion in this paper is that there is a need to reexamine the meaning of constructivism in an age where the concept has come to mean different things to different people. This paper examines one person's understanding of constructivism in order to uncover multiple meanings of the term in ways that ultimately affect teachers' practice in K-12…

This document focuses on how mathematics teaching and learning can be improved by developing more powerful approaches to connect thinking and mathematics. It proposes changing perspectives on what it means to learn and do mathematics and explores how these perspectives can be incorporated into the teaching of secondary school mathematics. Chapter…

Because of the increased influence of the whole language approach at the elementary and middle school levels and the increased emphasis on enriching instruction through reading across the curriculum, one alternative approach to teaching science which has received some attention from science and science education organizations is the use of…

This creative philosophical essay demonstrates Vygotsky's principles in the form of an extended fictional thought-experiment, in which the author is "interviewed" by a fictional Ukrainian reporter, Natasha. The introduction, "Squaring Russian Theory with American Practice," gives some background in Vygotsky's and Davydov's…

The theme for the Association for Counselor Education and Supervision (ACES) 1993-94 was to promote professionalism, collaboration, and advocacy. To facilitate these goals, the ACES president, Barbara Griffin, engaged the members in a dialogue about change--a change supportive of collaboration and advocacy, a change that called for a strong…

Memory work has potential usefulness as a method of helping students explore their relationship to science. Students have multiple early experiences with the natural world, but often these experiences are divorced from their school-based learning. It is known, however, that students use their informal experiences of the natural world in their…