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…

Open online courses (OOC) with a massive number of students have represented an important development for online education in the past years. A course on artificial intelligence, CS221, at the University of Stanford was offered in the fall of 2011 free and online which attracted 160,000 registered students. It was one of three offered as an…

To help students meet the demands of society, the University of Houston is using the framework of learning communities and constructivism to create a cross-disciplinary approach to teaching to provide media-rich thematically linked courses to engage a diverse student population. A case study investigated three semesters of thematically linked…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the instructional effects of using animations, static figures, PowerPoint bulletins, and e-plus software as chemistry texts with the aid of computer-based technology. This study analyzed the characteristics of students involved in three multimedia courses and their achievement and attitude toward chemistry…

This article contains a description of the organization and method of use of an active learning environment named MODeLeR, (Multimedia Object Design Learning Resource), a tool designed to facilitate the learning of concepts pertaining to object modeling with the Unified Modeling Language (UML). MODeLeR was created to provide an authentic,…

Purpose: This paper draws on research which began in 2006 with students in a graduate course on rural education. Its purpose was to find out what graduate students saw as current issues of rural education, how that compared to the literature, and what they thought supporting agencies such as government and universities needed to be doing to…

The ultimate goal of high school mathematics teachers is to create a meaningful learning environment that is conducive to teaching students the necessary concepts for academic achievement. Unfortunately, evidence suggests that many secondary educators still teach in a rote lecture style that focuses on the teacher providing information to passive,…

A study involving upper elementary school students (n=30) was conducted to examine conceptual change and constructivism. It is argued that a constructivist view of learning is antithetical to a vision of conceptual change in which teachers act in a diagnostic and remediate manner to help students rid themselves of their inaccurate ideas. It…

This paper examines past theories and conceptions of epistemology and the work of some key theorists currently working in the field, in the hope of motivating the development of an expanded conception and redescription of epistemology. The paper uses as a metaphor for the study six blind men who describe an elephant as like a rope, a tree, a fan,…

This book is based on the premise that learning in young children takes place through participation in purposeful activity and the learning process includes building on what children already know and enabling children to take responsibility for their own learning. It focuses not just on recent pedagogical developments in science, but shows,…

There is widespread acceptance that teaching from a constructivist paradigm requires a learning environment, a set of teaching-learning strategies, and a method of assessment that differs significantly from those usually found in classrooms that operate from a behaviorist theory or from an objectivist epistemology. There is, however, less…

An investigation was conducted to determine the effectiveness of utilizing analogies to effect conceptual change in mathematics. Forty-one high school seniors participated in a knowledge reconstruction process regarding their beliefs about everyday probability situations such as sports events or lotteries. These mathematics students were given…

This paper describes the use of radical constructivism as a basis for curriculum reform in university mathematics courses and reports on research conducted on two of the courses developed, one in geometry and one in problem solving. The theoretical underpinnings of the project are described along with the implications for course design and…