This guide for adults provides directions for setting up activities to help children ages two to eight discover scientific facts using familiar materials. The activities are child centered and are presented from a constructivist perspective which acknowledges that children and adults need to form their own hypotheses and keep applying them through…

Piagetian and Vygotskian theories may be used as starting points to examine the role of play in development and learning from a constructivist perspective, including how children use play to deepen their understanding and skills, encounter new problems, and incorporate newly mastered skills into their play. Contemporary factors such as an emphasis…

Beginning teachers experience problems in moving from a traditional classroom environment to a constructivist classroom, especially in their use of traditional language. Traditional language not only does not work in a constructivist classroom, but hinders the creating and sustaining of such. Teachers can change the language they use in the…

This volume contains 48 papers and 9 abstracts/research notes. Titles include: "Alternative constructs and cognitive development: commonalities, divergences and possibilities for evidence"; "Discipline knowledge and confidence to teach science: self-perceptions of primary teacher education students"; "Teacher beliefs about…

Defining better implicit models of children's actions in a series of situations is of paramount importance to understanding how knowledge is constructed. The objective of this study was to analyze the implicit mental models used by children in complex change problems to understand the stability of the models and their evolution with the child's…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics' (NCTM) Curriculum and Evaluation Standards and Professional Standards for Teaching Mathematics grew out of the Council's vision for developing a confident command of mathematics in all students. This booklet provides a brief overview of the NCTM Standards--the important components, the underlying…

The primary purpose of this book is to help teachers develop new insight into the learner's experience of science learning in school settings. The book focuses on the personal experience of the learner, taking the position that learning must be understood not only as a cognitive experience but also as an emotional, personal, social, and cultural…

This book is about mathematics, teaching and learning and how these are affected by a constructivist philosophy. Chapter 1 presents background to the study of an investigative approach to mathematics teaching. Chapter 2 provides an account of constructivism as a philosophy of knowledge and learning and includes a rationale for both radical and…

As a component of the school curriculum, science has features that are both unique and representative. This book explores the idea that the socialization of students is not only a matter of their deportment, attitudes, and conduct, but is also very significantly associated with the meanings provided by their educational experiences. The chapters…

This monograph addresses the basic ideas of constructivism in the context of science teaching. Instructional practices for applying constructivist-based teaching principles explained in this document include using open-ended, hands-on activities; cooperative learning; various questioning strategies; student journals; and a curriculum based on the…

The construction of internal representations in the domain of mathematics education is conceived as a signification process in this paper. Contrary to the established representation theory, it does not distinguish between an externally represented world and an internally representing world. Representation is regarded as a process in which new…

The typical approach to curriculum in the English language arts fits well with the traditional, content-centered approach to instruction. Such an approach to curriculum, however, is appropriate to a pedagogy that construes knowledge as fixed and transmittable but inappropriate to a pedagogy that views learning as constructed by the learner rather…

What if…..? What if there was a kingdom in which the ordinary was perceived as extraordinary and mediocrity was the standard of excellence? In what ways might this society mold the mindset of its subjects? How might a creative and innovative newcomer respond to the intellectually numbing environment? Would she have the courage to defy conformity…

The main purpose of this article is to introduce a critical curriculum design approach for bringing curriculum change for Blended Learning in higher education. Furthermore, the strategies, principles and challenges of this approach are also presented. This paper provides a perspective on such serious concerns as whether curriculum change should…

This short paper is designed to serve as a kind of primer for professors interested in thinking through ways to build a rural dimension into mathematics education courses in the interest of squarely addressing the vision and mission of ACCLAIM. Few words, therefore, will be deployed in the interest of establishing an intellectual warrant for the…