This article describes a research project undertaken as part of a Master's degree drawing on the author's recent professional experience as a primary teacher and headteacher. It explores the possibilities and benefits of supporting the development of social research skills with a class of seven- and eight-year-old (Year 3) children in one English…

Context: In-training assessment (ITA), defined as multiple assessments of performance in the setting of day-to-day practice, is an invaluable tool in assessment programmes which aim to assess professional competence in a comprehensive and valid way. Research on clinical performance ratings, however, consistently shows weaknesses concerning…

We present an alternative method in the constructive perspective to enhance student learning through a multimedia project, in which computing and multimedia technologies are used to enable students to participate more actively in their own learning. Students in a second year course in the Multimedia University, Malaysia, used the multimedia…

This paper reports on an ongoing project to develop an "eLingua" Latin language-learning application that combines natural-language text-input with computer game-based approaches to discovery learning. The program aims to create a content-based immersive environment within which to test the hypothesis that second-language learning is more…

Learning in a socially mediated context like a classroom places emphasis on the ability of learners to communicate their ideas to others, and for members of a class to achieve shared meaning or intersubjectivity (IS). We take a participatory view of IS, where both consensual agreement and disagreement are regarded as aspects of a common set of…

The concept of a function is fundamental to virtually every aspect of mathematics and every branch of quantitative science. Presently this type of thinking is carolled at the secondary level, and yet it has many benefits for deepening the understanding of early arithmetic. This is particularly so in the way that operations can be considered as…

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between constructivism and neural organization. Support is given for a constructivist epistemology in current brain theory. A brief description of constructivism is provided, followed by the implication of this set of beliefs for viewing humans as self-organizing systems. What has been…

Both mathematics and informatics share common characteristics. Several didacticians propose therefore to define didactic situations permitting learners to "co-construct" knowledge of mathematics and informatics. In this document, the idea is resumed and a certain number of "functional structures" are proposed. These sets of problems take on a…

What it means to use research is a potentially contentious topic. With the emphasis on constructivist approaches in teacher education programs, the traditional explanations involving generalizability are inadequate in that there is no consideration of what the user brings to the use. Discussion of the various ways in which use can be framed leads…

By the development of the technology, every styles of life and human being action face with changes. Fast, global and remarkable time come to be considerable. Social, global, cultural, educational competitiveness have been changed by the implication of the technology. Therefore; these changes also affect the learning styles, duration and method of…

This paper discusses whether thinking skills can be taught. The concept of teaching thinking goes back to the ancient Greeks. The notion of inborn intelligence was dominant until the 1960s but was challenged by the constructivism theory developed by Vygotsky. The discussion is divided into 5 sections: (1) describing thinking and intelligence; (2)…

This paper addresses the issue of how Harvard Project Zero's "teaching for understanding" might evolve over the next 100 years. Schools pitched to an Information Society seek ways of increasing the chances that learners will understand domains deeply and master the new basic skills. Such 21st century schools build upon Paulo Freire's…

Postmodernism is a multi-faceted movement of people who share a dissatisfaction with knowledge claims that embrace universalism. In contrast to science, the centerpiece of the Enlightenment, postmodernism sees only power games of discourse with no external reality existing as the ultimate arbiter. In science education, postmodernism is seen in the…

There is a frequent misperception that the move from behaviorism to cognitivism implies an abandonment of the possibilities of decomposing knowledge into its elements for the purposes of study and decontextualizing these elements for instruction. Cognitivism does not imply outright rejection of decomposition and decontextualization. Two movements…

The "paradigm dialogue" is an attempt to examine the philosophical positions of competing social science "ways of knowing" in the hope of establishing a dialogue among these different schools of thought. Three paradigms--postpositivism, critical theory, and constructivism--were examined in regard to their stances on three…