Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the transdisciplinary case study (TCS) as a learning framework based on what we call functional socio-cultural constructivism and project-based learning (PBL). In doing so, the paper attempts to illustrate the applicability of TCS to learn competencies and skills necessary to research problems of…

Purpose: Seeks to explain some of the dynamics of scripts creation as used in training, to offer some theoretical underpinning regarding the influence of script creation on behavior and performance, and to offer some examples of how script creation is applied in training activities. Design/methodology/approach: The paper explains in detail and…

The purpose of this study was to determine the beliefs about biological evolution held by college freshman students in one Catholic university in the Philippines. After 4 weeks of constructivist-inspired instruction, interviews and journal entries revealed that the students have diverse beliefs about the theory of evolution. They posited…

This study investigated students' conceptions of constructivist learning activities in a problem-based learning (PBL) and a traditional curriculum. We examined whether students who have chosen for a problem-based curriculum have different conceptions of constructivist assumptions compared to students who have chosen to be enrolled in a…

Despite the success that instructors and learners often enjoy with online university courses, learners have also reported that they miss face-to-face contact when learning online. The purpose of this inquiry was to identify learners' perceptions of what is missing from online learning and provide recommendations for how we can continue to innovate…

Strengths-based social work practice has become a major approach to working with clients. The social constructivist perspective is a foundation of this approach. Narrative treatment is one form of strengths-based practice arising from a social constructive perspective. The demands of time and material needing to be covered in the social work…

This study investigated the relationship between technology use and skills and the use of constructivist instructional practices among teachers in rural schools. Teachers in this study responded to Moersch's instrument, the Levels of Technology Implementation (LoTi). The LoTi was administered to the fourth and eighth grade teachers in 11 school…

This study investigates how inservice teachers constructed new knowledge, the extent of knowledge construction achieved, and how instructors participated in and facilitated the online discussion to affect knowledge construction. One finding is that most inservice teachers seemed to favor discussion activities at the stage of knowledge confirmation…

The latent power of social work's position at the centre of welfare services and as a coordinator and definer of social realities can be argued to have led social work to become "the assessment profession". Building upon a critique of the key distinction between "description and prescription", we argue that the…

This article presents a constructivist approach for teaching mathematics to prospective elementary school teachers in USA. This approach employs a model of a "mathematical situation," a set of physical operations and a physical language to reason about students' mathematical doings. One of the primary goals of this approach is to promote a…

This article presents case studies of middle school science and social studies teachers who used three different curricular cultures to teach units in their subject areas. The teachers participating in the study are aptly described as hard working and successful in terms of satisfactory performance of their students on state assessments over time…

A socio-constructivist account of learning and emotions stresses the situatedness of every learning activity and points to the close interactions between cognitive, conative and affective factors in students' learning and problem solving. Emotions are perceived as being constituted by the dynamic interplay of cognitive, physiological, and…

Reform in geography education, as reflected in "Geography for Life: National Geography Standards" (1994) for the U.S.A., favors a constructivist approach to learning. This study examines the acceptance of this approach among students in two upper secondary schools in China. A lesson was developed to illustrate interactive problem solving…

This essay suggests a way for creating a curriculum for the future amidst the challenges of post-modern uncertainty. Curriculum discourse in the past has been dominated by widely-accepted key questions, which produce and maintain curricula that are essentially fragmented and reductionistic, and directly opposed to the essential demands of the…

The present study draws on environmental science education to explore aspects of children's conceptual change regarding hazardous household items. Twelve children from a fifth-grade class attended a 300-h teaching module of environmentally oriented science activities aimed at assessing their awareness about the environmental and health hazards…