This study focused on effective teaching strategies for university professors. The researchers studied the relationship between teaching effectiveness and the dynamics of student demographics. An examination of the changes in the composition of the college population over the last few decades, based on statistical data, as well as an overview of…

A questionnaire was administered to 313 teacher education students of the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore to examine their conceptions about teaching and learning. Two dimensions were identified, viz. traditional and constructivist conceptions about teaching and learning. While both conceptions were…

"Talking Stones" is an interview technique that is designed to support self advocacy, particularly for groups of disaffected school students whose views may be difficult to elicit. It has been developed and refined to incorporate a view of learners as active agents in their own learning and is compatible with reflective practice and a…

The goal of the family literacy workshop "Reading Theatre, Parents as Actors: Movie production in a Family Literacy Workshop" is to empower and motivate parents to learn various storytelling strategies through theatrical production experiences and apply them at home. This is a theory-based family literacy practice supported by McClelland's…

In this article we present and discuss an integrated system of continuous assessment (ISCA) in higher education, designed to collect multiple evidences of students' knowledge and abilities, and to facilitate monitoring and support of their learning processes. Inspired by a socio-constructivist approach, which assumes a close relation between…

This is a study of a science teacher's beliefs concerning how a professional development program affect both the teaching strategies used and the beliefs professed influence classroom instruction after participating in the Iowa Chautauqua Professional Development program. The results of the study indicate that teachers often have problems with…

In this study, social constructionism provided a theoretical framework for investigating how students' struggles with reading are socially constructed in school literacy contexts, curriculum, and relationships. The study also sought to discover how "struggling reader" is a socially constructed subjectivity or identity that begins in the early…

The term scientific literacy is defined differently in different contexts. The term literacy simply refers to the ability for one to read and write, but recent studies in language literacy have extended this definition. New literacy research seeks a redefinition in terms of how skills are used rather than how they are learned. Contemporary…

Teachers who attempt to promote metacognitive learning strategies in their pupils usually encounter resistance because the pupils believe that they should be instructed by a teacher. One step in overcoming such resistance is to help students to recognize and discuss their implicit views. This document describes a repertory grid which can be used…

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…