"Building Decision Skills" aims to raise middle and high school students' awareness of ethics, help them gain practical experience in developing core values, and give them practical strategies for dealing with ethical dilemmas. "Building Decision Skills" consists of 10 lessons that can fill two consecutive weeks of daily…

"Facing History and Ourselves" aims to promote core character education values and to help middle and high school students develop moral reasoning skills. Students examine historical events, in particular the events that led to World War II and the Holocaust. Teachers participate in professional development seminars and apply the content…

This book sets out a constructivist, inquiry-based approach to instruction. The approach builds on clear understandings of children's current levels of knowledge, where their learning should progress to, and the means by which children learn early numeracy topics. The methods presented in this book have been used extensively by practitioners in…

In 1996-1997, within the framework of the European Observatory for Population Education and Information, a comparative survey was conducted among students in final classes of secondary education in several European countries. On the one hand, the survey attempted to assess the effects of education on population in terms of knowledge acquired; the…

As part of a large-scale instructional intervention research, this study examined elementary students' science knowledge and awareness of social activism with regard to an increased greenhouse effect and global warming. The study involved fifth-grade students from five elementary schools of varying demographic makeup in a large urban school…

As part of the Victorian Early Numeracy Research Project, over 1400 Victorian children in the first (Preparatory) year of school were assessed in mathematics by their classroom teachers. Using a task-based, one-to-one interview, administered during the first and last month of the school year, a picture emerged of the mathematical knowledge and…

The article examines the results from an 18-month follow-up evaluation of an abstinence education curriculum series. Participants were students from 15 school districts recruited to participate in the project. The intervention was the Sex Can Wait curriculum series, consisting of upper elementary, middle school, and high school components. The…

This study examined the use of rubrics in scoring a performance-based assessment. After receiving a health lesson of ways to have a healthy brain, fifth grade students were given an assignment to illustrate and write a booklet that demonstrated their knowledge of the topic. From students' responses the researchers constructed four sample papers…

Studies of knowledge constructing often focus on the analysis of a single episode, without considering enough the history of the learners, or the future learners' trajectories with regard to the concepts learned. This paper presents an example of knowledge constructing within the context of peer learning. We show how the design of the task and the…

This paper presents findings of a study that examined the effects of a violence-prevention program on students' acquisition of knowledge about violence. The violence-prevention program, an adaptation of the Prothrow-Stith (1987) curriculum model, was implemented in seventh-grade health-education classes in a rural Mississippi River-delta…

The difficulty of 44 items from the life sciences subscale of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 1985-86 science assessment was analyzed in terms of item attributes and science educators' judgments of difficulty. The attributes included ratings of various characteristics of the items' text and option set, the items' cognitive…

This study is a key concept in making design more fruitful in education. It is proposed that what students are doing when they construct knowledge is studying. For several years, Teachers College, Columbia University and the Dalton School (an independent school in New York City), have been collaborating on the Dalton Technology Project. The goal…

In this preliminary investigation (part of a study of the role of prior knowledge in learning) the views of students about prior knowledge and the importance it has for learning were studied. An effort was made to verify whether the previously proposed model of the concept was congruent with student views. Forty of 120 students at the Open…

This paper describes the analysis of teacher pedagogical content knowledge for the topics of heat, energy, and temperature. The results of the study of these (n=6) 7th and 8th grade teachers indicate that teachers may be weak in this type of knowledge despite their experience and pedagogical expertise. Specific information is provided about…

This paper presents an information processing model of test anxiety in an attempt to explain the mechanism of test anxiety's effect on working memory within the framework of the American College Testing Program Assessment (ACT). The model suggests that the construct of test anxiety, both worry and emotionality, is represented in the declarative…