This article describes part of a study in which researchers designed lesson sequences based around using a string number line to help teachers support children's development of relative thinking and understanding of linear scale. In the first year of the study, eight teachers of Years 3-5 participated in four one-day professional development…

Developmental psychology plays a central role in shaping evidence-based best practices for prelingually deaf children. The Auditory Scaffolding Hypothesis (Conway et al., 2009) asserts that a lack of auditory stimulation in deaf children leads to impoverished implicit sequence learning abilities, measured via an artificial grammar learning (AGL)…

Instructional technologies critically depend on systematic design, and learning hierarchies are a commonly advocated tool for designing instructional sequences. But hierarchies routinely allow numerous sequences and choosing an optimal sequence remains an unsolved problem. This study explores a simulation-based approach to modeling learning…

The following outlines the rationale and structure of a professional learning initiative that seeks to explore teachers' ways of engaging students more actively in building mathematical connections for themselves. An example of one of the suggested experiences is presented.

Career and technical education (CTE) courses, including agricultural education courses, are home to a disproportionately large number of students with learning disabilities. Agricultural education has been sought as a potential solution to teaching abstract STEM concepts through experiential learning methods. Abstract concepts are noted in the…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of a clustered forward chaining (CFC) procedure to teach a 23-year-old male with autism to follow written recipes. CFC incorporates elements of forward chaining (FC) and total task chaining (TTC) by teaching a small number of steps (i.e., units) using TTC, introducing new units sequentially (akin to FC), and…

Learning progressions detail the incremental steps that students take as they learn to master a skill. These progressions are based on developmental research about how students learn and how their thinking develops as a result of instruction. A typical progression not only describes the stages that students must master, but it also shows what…

This paper describes an emerging approach to the design of task sequences and the theory that undergirds it. The approach aims at promoting particular mathematical concepts, understood as the result of reflective abstraction. Central to this approach is the identification of available student activities from which students can abstract the…

Action research has been described as "designing the plane while flying it" (Herr & Anderson, 2005, p. 69). A black box documented the researcher's decisions while facilitating leadership development sessions with teacher leaders. Ten process folio steps informed the study through six iterations. Planning steps included a design…

This paper builds on the current literature base about learning progressions in science to address the question, "What is the nature of the learning progression in the content domain of the structure of matter?" We introduce a learning progression in response to that question and illustrate a methodology, the Construct Modeling (Wilson,…

This article revisits the cognitive load theory to explore the use of worked examples to teach a selected topic in a higher level undergraduate physics course for distance learners at the School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia. With a break of several years from receiving formal education and having only minimum science…

The purpose of this article is to question the suitability of the phonics screening check in relation to models and theories of reading development. The article questions the appropriateness of the check by drawing on theoretical frameworks which underpin typical reading development. I examine the Simple View of Reading developed by Gough and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the different sequence generation techniques for learning, which are applied to a broad category of personalized learning experiences. The papers have been classified using different attributes, such as the techniques used for sequence generation, attributes used for sequence generation; whether…

Instruction often starts with an explanation of a concept or principle before students are presented with problems to be solved. Recent research indicates that reversing this widely used tell-and-practice sequence (T&P) so that exploratory problem-solving precedes the instructional explanation (i.e., PS-I) might be more beneficial. We aimed to…

This dissertation examines the thesis that implicit learning plays a role in learning about scientific phenomena, and subsequently, in conceptual change. Decades of research in learning science demonstrate that a primary challenge of science education is overcoming prior, naive knowledge of natural phenomena in order to gain scientific…