The federal government is devoting millions of dollars to charter and voucher programs that currently require parents to abandon regular public schools. The goal of the authors of The School Choice Hoax is to expose the misleading hyperbole that has been driving the school choice movement and to show how charter schools can become more effective…

We believe that one powerful model for preparing culturally responsive teachers who are well equipped to increase family involvement is through established partnerships between universities and high-need schools. Participants in this program are involved in a variety of cross-cultural experiences in a school that serves culturally, linguistically,…

E-learning and distance education can play a role in helping older adults become integrated with the rest of society. As demographic and cultural changes affect the place of older adults in society, online learning programs become increasingly appealing to older adults. In this article, I discuss (1) the changing notion of work and learning in…

This study explores variation in postgraduate students' and supervisors' conceptions of research. Based on earlier work, a Conceptions of Research Inventory (CoRI) was trialled on a mixed sample of postgraduate students and supervisors (n = 251). Exploratory factor analyses of resultant data yields a five-dimensional empirical model, the…

Providing alternatives to the way grammar is taught, this proceedings includes every paper (or summary) except one delivered at a conference on the future of grammar in American schools. Papers in the proceedings are: "Keynote: The Future of Grammar in American Schools" (Martha Kolln); "Approaches to Grammar: Teaching &…

ChemSource is designed as a strategy to help preservice and inservice high school chemistry teachers promote student learning more effectively. Its major premise is that well-designed laboratory investigations are an important avenue for cultivating student interest, engagement, and meaningful learning in chemistry. The SourceBook component of…

Previous research has cast doubt on children's ability to use specified evidence when making causal inferences, or, indeed, to differentiate between the specified evidence and their own preconceptions, or "prior theories." The present study continues previous work by distinguishing between children's reasoning in conditions where…

This study examined students' knowledge associated with AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) and attitudes toward AIDS patients in three remote rural Oregon school districts. Subjects were 139 females and 149 males in 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10 grades. The questionnaire used in the study was designed to obtain information concerning knowledge and…

This paper presents a study in a UK university that investigated how first-year (freshman) Information Systems undergraduates perceive learning through courseware containing real-world erroneous examples derived from their peers and what obstacles had to be overcome to implement effective e-Learning support for using and creating such courseware.…

The aim of this study was to identify deficiencies in students' knowledge and understanding of basic algebraic concepts and operations. Since analysis of errors is an effective way of tracing misconceptions in mathematics, a diagnostic test was compiled for this purpose. A total of 162 items was included in the test which was administered to 4,635…

This study explored the usefulness of an approach to science instruction which specifically considered children's spontaneous conceptions about natural phenomena. The aim of the instruction was the development of conceptual understanding. The instructional approach involved diagnosing children's spontaneous conceptions, making them aware of their…

Much of the focus in science education has been on the theoretical constructs and practical implications of conceptual change. History of science, cognitive theory, and alternative conceptions have been used as backdrops for the study of the child's conceptual movement away from naive beliefs about scientific phenomena. In this study, conceptual…

Preservice teacher education, when viewed through a constructivist lens, should consider preconceptions because it is important that students be initially aware of their own attitudes and of the beliefs that they carry with them. Preconceptions also provide a reference point about which students may reflect as new meanings are acquired. This paper…

This study describes the relationship of two cognitive variables, logical thinking and disembedding ability, to learners' abilities to make conceptual shifts from less acceptable to more acceptable conceptual understandings of a physical phenomenon. The difference in the logical thinking and disembedding ability of students who exhibited different…

In a step toward creating a robust natural language understanding system which detects and avoids miscommunication, this artificial intelligence research report provides a taxonomy of miscommunication problems that arise in expert-apprentice dialogues (including misunderstandings, wrong communication, and bad analogies), and proposes a flexible…