This article examines concepts and propositions from a theoretical perspective, and establishes the need for and develops an extension to Concept Maps (CMaps), called Cyclic Concept Maps (Cyclic CMaps). Cyclic CMaps are considered to be an appropriate tool for representing knowledge of functional or dynamical relationships between concepts. CMaps,…

This article reports on research undertaken as part of the government initiatives to transform educational practices and raise standards through new technologies. In particular, it focuses on differences between home and school experiences of ICT use and formal/informal learning opportunities. First, the issues arising from the growing body of…

In response to the demand for sound science assessments, this article presents the development of a latent construct called knowledge integration as an effective measure of science inquiry. Knowledge integration assessments ask students to link, distinguish, evaluate, and organize their ideas about complex scientific topics. The article focuses on…

Creativity, which has now entered the discourse in higher education alongside other agenda items such as enterprise, entrepreneurship and innovation, is an elusive and complex notion. It may evade the sort of definition, categorisation and compartmentalisation required to integrate it fully into the curriculum frameworks and assessment regimes…

Based on the recommendation of the AAAS and the NRC, middle level science is the rightful introduction for a systems approach, including the study of its parts, subsystems, interconnections, and interrelationships. Dr. Seuss's "The Lorax" provides an excellent opportunity to combine ecological consequences within a systems approach (Sweeney 2001).…

Universities should embrace democratic values. Using electronic portfolios, competency-based assessment can enact them. Rather than preset standards, competencies become boundary objects connecting individual student experience to community conversation about what it means to be educated. This article examines this approach in practice at New…

There has recently been significant emphasis placed on environmental education through, for example, the UN's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Despite this, there is still considerable debate within the literature as to how the aims of environmental education can be achieved within schools. It seems likely that if there is a lack…

The authors describe their design for an Internet-based learning environment called BeyondShare in which students are encouraged to gain a deep understanding of the learning material, reflect on the quality of individual constructions through sharing and peer evaluation, and synthesize cross-unit knowledge by integrating self- and peer-produced…

The "Multiple Intelligences, Curriculum and Assessment Project" at University College Cork was a collaborative project carried out between 1995 and 1999. The key research question focused on whether Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences could be applied to, and enhance, aspects of curriculum and assessment at primary and…

Although the field of operations management has come a long way since its beginnings in scientific management, the field still appears somewhat amorphous and unstructured to many. Introductory operations management textbooks usually include a number of largely disjointed topics, which leave many students (and their instructors) without a coherent…

This article considers the impact of the early stages of an international project, Gardens for Life (GfL), on children's perceptions of school gardening and on their learning. The project involved 67 schools in England, Kenya and India and focused on the growing of crops, recognising the importance of both the process and product of this activity…

Evaluators often make key decisions about what content to include when designing new scales. However, without clear conceptual grounding, there is a risk these decisions may compromise the scale's validity. Techniques such as concept mapping are available to evaluators for the specification of conceptual frameworks, but have not been used as a…

Change and complexity are creating a need for increasing levels of literacy in science and technology. Presently, we are beginning to provide students with clear contexts in which to learn, including clearly written text, visual displays and maps, and more effective instruction. We are also beginning to give students tools that promote their own…

This article reviews three major uses of the concept-mapping strategies for postsecondary learning: the external representation of concept maps as an external scratch pad to represent major ideas and their organization, the mental construction of concept maps when students are seeking a time-efficient tool, and the electronic construction and…

This article reports the use of concept mapping to reveal patterns of student learning (or non-learning) in the course of master's level teaching for research methods. The work was done with a group of 12 postgraduate students, and the concept maps of four individuals produced "before" and "after" a single teaching intervention…