This paper synthesis's three theoretical perspectives, including sociocultural theory, distributed cognition, and situated cognition, into a framework to guide the design and assessment of Web 2.0 practices in higher education. In addition, this paper presents a case study of Web 2.0 practices. Thirty-seven online graduate students participated in…

Mobile and wireless communication technologies not only enable anytime and anywhere learning, but also provide the opportunity to develop learning environments that combine real-world and digital-world resources. Nevertheless, researchers have indicated that, without effective tools for helping students organize their observations in the field,…

Open-ended, inquiry-based multiweek laboratory exercises are the key elements to increasing students' understanding and retention of the major biological concepts. Including original research into undergraduate teaching laboratories has also been shown to motivate students and improve their learning. Here, we present a series of original…

Black, Wilson, and Yao (this issue) make a compelling case for a coherent model of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, all built around a well-specified theory of learning. Arguing that dominant assessment policies and practices tend to drive pedagogy and student attitudes toward learning in pernicious ways, Black et al. make an argument that is…

This study aimed to produce indicators and guidelines for clinician use in determining whether individual therapy sessions for community rehabilitation services should be delivered in a home/community-based setting or centre-based setting within a flexible service delivery model. Concept mapping techniques as described by Tochrim and Kane (2005)…

One valuable goal of instructional technologies in K-12 education is to prepare students for future learning. Two classroom studies examined whether Teachable Agents (TA) achieves this goal. TA is an instructional technology that draws on the social metaphor of teaching a computer agent to help students learn. Students teach their agent by…

Two experiments investigated the effects of characteristic features of concept mapping used for prior knowledge activation. Characteristic demands of concept mapping include connecting lines representing the relationships between concepts and labeling these lines, specifying the type of the semantic relationships. In the first experiment,…

Students' difficulties with accurately conceptualizing the relationships among the Earth, Moon, and Sun are well documented. Any teacher who has seen the film "A Private Universe" (Schneps and Sadler 1988) will remember the challenge the interviewees experienced when trying to explain their understanding of this phenomenon. This paper describes a…

The present study aimed to evaluate whether a chemistry laboratory course called "Laboratory Experiments in Science Education" based on constructivist instruction accompanied with concept mapping enhanced pre-service chemistry teachers' conceptual understanding. Data were collected from five pre-service chemistry teachers at a university…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of concept-mapping strategies with three different generativity levels (expert-generated concept map, partially learner-generated concept map, fully learner-generated concept map) on knowledge acquisition. Interaction between learners' self-regulated learning (SRL) skills and different levels of…

This study aimed at investigating whether applying pre-writing strategies would affect the quality of L2 learners' compositions. Twenty three adult EFL students from Jahad-e-Daneshgahi English centre in Iran participated in this study. They were randomly assigned to control and experimental groups, including 11 and 12 participants in each. They…

The purpose of the study was to examine how teachers enhance their knowledge of rational numbers focused on modeling problem tasks using multiple representations. The professional development summer institute and the follow-up Lesson Study (Lewis, 2002) throughout the academic year focused on engaging teachers in rational numbers and proportional…

High-stakes tests take time away from valuable learning activities, narrow the focus of instruction, and imply that science involves memorizing details rather than understanding the natural world. Current tests lead precollege instructors to postpone science inquiry activities until after the last standardized test is completed--often during the…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the integration of strategic management and quality assurance in higher education. The study presents how the value chain can be described in the strategy and quality maps, which are, respectively graphical representations of the strategic plan and the quality assurance system. The quality map is a new…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effects of node-link mapping on students' meaningful learning and conceptual change in a 1-semester introductory life-science course. This study used node-link mapping to integrate and apply the National Research Council's (NRC, 2005) three principles of human learning: engaging students' prior…