This study examines three middle school and secondary school English teachers' attempts to adapt and enact the principles and practices of the "Fostering a Community of Learners" (FCL) model. As a systemic pedagogical model designed to foster authentic dialogue and inquiry, FCL challenges deeply held traditions of English as both a…

The Singaporean education system is undergoing many changes in order to develop schools and nation which cultivate learning and education. A crucial success factor to these initiatives is the teacher. Singapore needs reflective teachers who can continually reflect upon their own practices to find better ways of teaching as well as maintain their…

Although assessment is acknowledged as vitally important in its effect on students' approaches to learning, there is much criticism of assessment practice. This paper argues that if a social constructivist approach is applied to the assessment process many of the problems could be overcome. It describes what a social constructivist approach to…

Incorporation of forms of popular culture into the classroom provides a meeting place where students and teachers can share their expertise. It is shown that within a constructivist model, where teaching and learning is a dynamic interchange between all classroom participants, students, and teachers can become co-investigators of culture.

Constructivist ideas have influenced recent major innovations in Dutch secondary education and new curricula for reading and math in primary education, for example, pay much more attention to metacognition than before. In our study, we compared the growth of student metacognition in varying learning environments, direct instruction, and cognitive…

This is a longitudinal study of the thinking about teaching science of beginning Hong Kong primary teachers. The research explores how their thinking changed from pre-service teacher education through to their first year as classroom teachers. It takes a more holistic view of teacher thinking than typical in the literature considering the nature,…

Second language (L2) reading comprehension assessment has long relied upon classical quantitative, product-oriented measurement techniques (i.e., multiple-choice and cloze) in both research and classroom assessment. As Bernhardt (1991) clearly demonstrated, these traditionally employed assessment methods are unable to capture the complex processes…

The author's thesis is that there is sufficient research evidence to make any reasonable person skeptical about the benefits of discovery learning--practiced under the guise of cognitive constructivism or social constructivism--as a preferred instructional method. The author reviews research on discovery of problem-solving rules culminating in the…

Memory-based and constructionist processes have both been proposed as essential components of the activation of concepts (e.g., propositions) and the establishment of meaningful connections between concepts during reading. In this article, we argue that a comprehensive theory of reading comprehension should include both sets of processes. In…

This article examines the notion of quality teaching, exploring its conceptual, empirical and normative properties. We begin by analyzing the concept of teaching, separating it into its task sense (what teachers try to do) and its achievement sense (the student learning that teachers foster). The analysis suggests that any determination of quality…

The methodological characteristics of teaching in primary and secondary education make it necessary to revise the pedagogical and instructive lines with which to introduce the new Information and Communication Technologies into the school context. The construction of Web pages that can be used to improve student learning is, therefore, fundamental…

This paper seeks to explain learning by examining five theories of learning--conceptual analysis, behavioural, constructivist, computational and connectionist. The first two are found wanting and rejected. Piaget's constructivist theory offers a general explanatory framework (assimilation and accommodation) but fails to provide an adequate account…

Constructivist theory must choose between the hypothesis that felt perturbation drives cognitive development (the priority of felt perturbation) and the hypothesis that the particular process that eventually produces new cognitive structures first produces felt perturbation (the continuity of process). There is ambivalence in Piagetian theory…

In this article we present details of a four-step constructivist-based teaching strategy, which helps students understand the dissolution of a gas in a liquid. The model derived from Ayas (1995) involves elicitation of pre-existing ideas, focusing on the target concept, challenging students' ideas, and applying newly constructed ideas to similar…

Instructional designers are expected to be familiar with the epistemological underpinnings of several theories and their consequences on the process of instruction. Constructivism is the dominant theory of the last decade and supports construction of knowledge by the individual. This paper discusses the basic principles underlying constructivism,…