Thomas Locker's book about nature entitled "Water Dance" (1997) provides the basis for this interdisciplinary project on Earth's water cycles. Through thoughtful consideration of the text and art in "Water Dance," students build and express deeper understanding of the water cycle (and the elements within). In addition, they develop the disposition…

Quality assurance in engineering education is a multifaceted problem further augmented by the stakeholders of engineering education. Students, parents and employers are rightfully questioning the quality of the curriculum, the instructional delivery, the learning environment, accessibility to learning technologies and equipment, employability as…

Curriculum design is a concern in European Universities as they face the forthcoming European Higher Education Area (EHEA). This process can be eased by the use of scientific tools such as Concept-Mapping Techniques (CMT) that extract and organize the most relevant information from experts' experience using statistics techniques, and helps a…

An event-related potentials (ERPs) study examined word-to-text integration processes across sentence boundaries. In a two-sentence passage, the accessibility of a referent for the first content word of the second sentence (the target word) was varied by the wording of the first sentence in one of the following ways: lexically (explicitly using…

Two language acquisition processes (comprehension preceding production of word order, the noun bias) were examined in 2- and 3-year-old children (n=10) with autistic spectrum disorder and in typically developing 21-month-olds (n=13). Intermodal preferential looking was used to assess comprehension of subject-verb-object word order and the tendency…

None of the various organizational methods (archival, categorical, encyclopedic, taxonomic, and statistical) employed to organize, classify, and categorize research in counseling psychology has been able to capture a sense of the whole; none appreciates the relations among research topics. Concept mapping, a research method in which nonmetric…

What is the nature of value and how can one identify the value claims made in evaluation documents? What is the proper philosophic basis for the treatment of values in evaluation? These and related concerns are addressed in this report. It is suggested that evaluation documents have a structure of claims or a conceptual design, and that, by means…

The intention behind this workshop is to summarise some of the research about the use of concept maps, concept circles, Gowin's Vee and similar metacognitive devices that enable outsiders to find out the individual's own understanding of particular concepts and the way in which these concepts are interlinked. There is research evidence to suggest…

Outlines an account of conceptual learning in terms of the conceptions that people hold, the status they award to their conceptions, and the conceptual ecology containing the criteria they use in determining status. (Author/CCM)

This article provides an overview of the research approach called concept mapping at conceptual, methodological, and practical levels. The relevance of the approach to counseling psychology research is discussed, and the approach is located conceptually in the realm of qualitative methods available to counseling psychology researchers. To…

This experimental study explores how 60 primary-age children's (9-11 years old) understanding of rocks was effected by instruction that used the conceptual structure of the rock cycle together with the analogy of aluminium can recycling. Using a combination of probes into children's understanding, including concept maps and semi-structured…

This paper focuses on the role of cognitive disequilibrium in preparing democratic educational leaders. Followers emerge into leaders with what are many times unconsciously socialized norms and values indigenous to their local culture. One of the roles of a democratic leadership preparation program is to challenge these unconsciously accepted…

Instruction of competent psychomotor skill necessitates an eclectic approach. The principles of learning, complemented with learning styles and sensory modalities preferences, provide a background for teaching physical skills. The use of the psychomotor domain of Bloom's Taxonomy as a map and corresponding behavioral objectives foster the mastery…

With the current focus in mathematics education on the importance of developing students' conceptual understanding, fluency with the language of mathematics, critical thinking, and working mathematically, teachers are constantly expected to design challenging and investigative tasks that can engage and motivate students in their learning of…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to determine possible grouping of similar MBA programmes offered by 45 British and French business schools accredited by the Association of Master Business Administration (AMBA) as of January 2006. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses the statistical co-plot method reported in a similar study of leading…