The purpose of this longitudinal investigation was to assess the nature, development, and changes in preservice secondary science teachers' (n=12) conceptions/knowledge structures of subject matter and pedagogy as they proceeded through a fifth-year Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program. Open ended written questionnaires were used in Phase I of…

The roles of impersonal (or abstract) and relational (or connected) modes of knowing in the experiences of young adults were studied, and the ways the two converge are described in this report of the post-college phase of a 7-year longitudinal study of the epistemological development of college students, i.e., their assumptions about the limits,…

Teams are becoming increasingly important as an organizational form, particularly in information systems (IS) development. In response to this trend, a number of educators, including IS educators, include team components as part of their course curriculum. For example, many systems analysis and design courses include a team project component. It…

Instructional research is synthesized, using categories specific and functional enough to provide guidance for classroom practice. The opening chapter presents a theory for conducting a theory-based meta-analysis of the research on instruction, outlining a theory that involves four elements of human information processing: the self-system, the…

An evaluation of the "Talking about Touching" personal safety (1996 editions) curricula for Preschool/Kindergarten and Grades 1-3 was conducted to determine the extent to which students retained information and effectively demonstrated the skills taught in the program and to gather feedback from practitioners using the program to guide…

A study explored rates of learning and political interest among students in the "Introduction to American Government" course at a community college. The study was sparked by calls for program review and outcomes assessment that are commonplace on contemporary American campuses. The study featured a pretest/posttest methodology and…

This paper describes a program implemented by Tennessee Technological University that provided a science enrichment program for disadvantaged and minority high school feamles in the rural areas surrounding the university and from inner city schools of Nashville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga. This model is based on a similar program that was…

The content validation method was used to develop a scale for measuring attitudes toward and knowledge about the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) for college students. The developed instrument, the Attitudes toward AIDS Scale (ATAS) consisted of a knowledge scale and an attitudes scale, each with 25 items chosen by a pool of AIDS…

Cognitive changes in college students from early in the freshman year to the end of the sophomore year were assessed using a pretest-posttest design. In all, 135 university students completed both a pretest and a posttest. The academic achievement measure used was the College Basic Academic Subjects Examination (CBASE), a test intended to assess…

The study investigated the role of a second language (L2) learner's prior cultural knowledge in target language lexical meaning-making. Comparison focuses on what important similarities in L2 lexical meaning-making of culturally loaded words appear among learners with the same ethnic background, and what important lexical meaning differences exist…

This report examines how students, especially those with high abilities, choose a college based on information from four areas: (1) published research comparing various schools' subjects as well as some unpublished comparative data from various sources; (2) young adult fiction that deals with issues related to college choice; (3) media accounts of…

This document reports the results of a study of the extent to which civics education and other factors contribute to student political knowledge. In particular, the research focused on how much the civics curriculum, student background, demographics, home environment, and individual student achievement affect 12th graders' awareness of government…

How a multimedia program that employs concept maps and hypertext for teaching "Hamlet" facilitated comprehension in an undergraduate course is described. Results suggest factors that instructional designers should take into account to improve learning. Thirty-six upper-division college students were enrolled in a course on Shakespeare at…

Three learning modules are described and investigated as they reflect different students' conceptions of and approaches to learning. The Schoolwork Module (SWM) focuses on task performance and involves a passive, incremental, piecemeal, and rote memory method of learning, parallel to what might be implied by the Information Processing model of…

A study was done to test four hypotheses on the orientation of American Urban Administrators toward cultural diversity management in the public sector workplace. The study sought to test: (1) the extent of familiarity with the literature on cultural diversity; (2) relative ranking of cultural diversity management capabilities; (3) how women and…