In the spring of 2005, the Bush administration announced that guidelines for following the mandates of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) had been made less restrictive. More of this "loosening" will follow, albeit quietly, lest the public discover the delusional qualities that went into the original version of the bill. Nevertheless, NCLB has…

In the past two decades, there has been a proliferation of research activities on exploring the use of concept maps to support teaching and learning of various knowledge disciplines which range from science to language subjects. MindNet, which is a collaborative concept mapping environment that supports both synchronous and asynchronous modes of…

Hypermedia as a learning environment complements traditional instruction as it places the student at a higher level of control. Instead of "wait and see" what the teacher expects the student to learn next, hypermedia stimulates the student to become aware of his/her own cognitive needs and interests. This paper presents a combination of notions…

As part of the Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement's (OERI) Studies in Education Reform Program, SRI's Center for Technology in Learning has been conducting a national study of the role of technology in supporting education reform, especially constructivist, student-centered teaching methods and instructional…

This book introduces the concept of leadership as the facilitation of constructivist reciprocal processes among participants in an educational community. Chapter 1, "Learning and Leading Theory: A Century in the Making," (Deborah Walker and Linda Lambert) traces the dynamic history of learning and leading during this century, concluding…

Introducing teacher education students to the use of information technologies for literacy instruction, this book presents a series of conceptual frameworks for thinking about how technology can support instruction--frameworks that will help teachers effectively integrate technology into their own teaching. The book also relates different ways of…

Reading science text is not simply a process of translating printed symbols into meaning; it involves the interaction of the reader's prior knowledge, beliefs, concurrent experience, and the text in a sociocultural context to construct new meaning and understanding. The purposes of this study were to: explore the associations between metacognition…

Constructionist learning is characterized by three principles: "learning-by-making,""holistic learning," and a freedom to choose learning styles. This paper describes a project with second grade homeschooling students that tested the feasibility of using HyperCard as a medium for constructionist learning. The "worlds"…

This paper outlines the constructivist approach to teaching and learning and reviews some of the literature to establish a linkage between constructivist theories of learning and humanistic psychology. In particular, the paper recognizes the work of Carl Rogers and suggests that his contributions to the professional literature on teaching and…

This book is designed to help the teacher become a reflective practitioner in the multicultural science classroom. The ideas presented are grounded in constructivist theory and emphasize a multicultural approach to science education. The first section, "Addressing Diversity," deals with issues germane to the science education needs of…

This paper summarizes the literature on research studies in informatics and changes in learning, particularly computer-assisted instruction. Research results themselves are often inconclusive when no allowances are made for different generations of hardware and software or computer types, when the computer is treated as the only variable in the…

Drawing on and extending the work of Jean Piaget into the realm of sociomoral development, this book argues that constructivist education must involve more than the special activities with which it is commonly associated. Planning must also include provision for children's social and moral development, since children construct their moral…

Constructivists believe that counselors and therapists help clients with the construction of knowledge by helping clients expand their alphabet into more flexible, viable, and complex acts of telling (language, conversations, narratives). Ways in which professionals can deconstruct the fundamental assumptions of the mental health professions and…

This paper is the written account of a panel presentation about inquiry-oriented teaching practices. The purpose of this group of papers is to provide an opportunity to explore the state of knowledge of inquiry-oriented teaching based on direct observation of teachers, and analysis of those observations from an inquiry perspective. The paper…

This fastback examines the theory and practice of constructivist teaching and suggests how teachers can decide what form of constructivist teaching they might want to use. Constructivist teaching theory is explored under the headings "knowledge" and "humans." According to constructivist theory, knowledge is constructed by humans, it is conjectural…