The seminar represents an effort on the part of the Center for Civic Education to create a forum in which teachers would become emotionally engaged with the artifacts, sites and experiences of those that lived through the Civil Rights Movement. The central hypothesis thereby being that such an engagement would transform the ability and willingness…

This paper presents a model and process for shared decision making among teacher education faculty, PreK-12 educators, and College of Science and Mathematics (COSM) faculty at Wright State University (WSU), Ohio. WSU used a process model to plan and articulate the simultaneous renewal of the education of educators and school teachers. The College…

This book provides a constructivist interpretation of developmentally appropriate preschool and kindergarten curriculum, incorporating descriptions of how activities are transformed over time and how children's reasoning is transformed, and placing the interpretation in the context of the play-oriented approach advocated by the National…

This paper reports a research practice of engaging middle school students to be multimedia designers using a project-based learning approach. Specifically, it addresses two questions: whether a learner-as-multimedia-designer environment can increase middle school students' motivation toward learning; and whether the middle school students'…

Constructivism is a response to the depersonalized hugeness of our society and institutions. The constructivist model for education offers a way to decentralize the authority of a large and distant administration and return decision-making to the local level, that is, to learning communities, teaching teams, and individual classroom teachers. This…

This guide is for preservice and inservice early childhood educators and presents ideas for active learning in science and mathematics. The child-centered and active-learning experiences represent three categories of learning opportunities: (1) projects; (2) activity series; and (3) activity centers. The experiences emphasize creating meaningful…

A group of nine tenured faculty members at a university on the Pacific Coast of the United States participated in this study that examined their use of emotion in instruction. The mixed gender group was ethnically diverse and included representatives from several departments. Observations of lectures focused on the faculty members' body movements,…

Replete with lessons for educators, this book reports in a personal way on a middle school classroom study undertaken by a teacher researcher that was to last 1 year but ended up lasting 6 years. The book contains the social and cultural forces that influence adolescents' literacy development--for instance, taking a hard look at the race and…

In an effort to develop a contextually-based evaluation of teacher competence, a three-year study was undertaken that focused on the classroom practices of beginning science teachers and beginning science teachers' perceptions and reflections of the teacher competence evaluation. Data related to instructional skills and changes in the growth of…

While there is general agreement that student attitudes toward science education are poor, there is little agreement in defining, measuring, or improving attitudes. The nature of how students relate to science rather than what they know about science is becoming an area of increased focus in science education research. This case study specifically…

This paper discusses using technology education in the elementary school to encourage innovation and adaptation, technological literacy, and creative problem solving. Technology education is seen based on hands-on activities where pupils make things and become familiar with their technological environment. The hands-on activity should evolve like…

This paper reports on the analysis of concept maps of the nature of science constructed by preservice secondary science teachers during a semester-long reflective process. During the 16-week fall semester of 1996, 17 students were enrolled in a 5-credit course. After analyzing all students' concept maps, students were classified as either good…

In an effort to improve a summer professional development program for inservice secondary mathematics and science teachers in Taiwan, a three-year action research project has recently been completed. The program attempted to provide participating teachers with a better theoretical and practical understanding of teaching and learning based on the…

An investigation-based course on teaching strategies for in-service science and mathematics teachers has been developed. The purpose of this course was to learn how to teach science or mathematics from the constructivist perspective. The course development was based on constructivism, especially social constructivism. Major adjustments concerning…

This paper examines the process of constructing a student-centered World Wide Web site and provides recommendations for improving this process. In the project, preservice teachers instructed the fifth grade students about how to design and develop a Web site on weather. The topics of the sessions included Internet ethics, using the Web,…