Technology offers promising opportunities for creating new types of classroom learning environments. This paper describes three technology models used by teacher education interns: electronic portfolios, negotiative concept mapping, cognote-supported electronic discussions. As implemented in the current study, these models invoke graduated…

This study describes 5th, 8th, and 11th-grade students', teachers', and medical professionals' conceptions of flu and microbial illness. Participants constructed a concept map on "flu" and participated in a semi-structured interview. The results showed that these groups of students, teachers and medical professionals held and structured their…

This article is about an investigation of six middle school science teachers' beliefs and instructional practice about the coherence of the science they teach as articulated by National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996). Many well intentioned reform efforts focus on improving content knowledge of teachers, but many classroom teachers…

In this article I describe a number of ways in which non-western cultures have adopted and used western educational approaches, forming an illustrative typology of these adaptations. I provide an illustration(s) of each category in the typology, briefly presenting the history of the category, detailing its modern state, and discussing selected…

Recent brain mapping studies have provided new insights into the cortical systems that mediate human speech perception. Electrocortical stimulation mapping (ESM) is a brain mapping method that is used clinically to localize cortical functions in neurosurgical patients. Recent ESM studies have yielded new insights into the cortical systems that…

Purpose--Training multimedia projects often face identical knowledge-transfer obstacles that partly originate in the multidisciplinarity of the project team. The purpose of this paper is to describe these difficulties and the tools used to overcome them. In particular, the aim is to show how elements of cognitive psychology theory (concept maps,…

In the context of internationalisation, the delivery of higher education programmes increasingly combines open learning with collaborations among people of diverse languages and cultures. In this paper we argue that while the literature on international education focuses on mapping modes of delivery in international education, there is also a need…

An experimental study compared celebrity evaluations of a treatment group exposed to a celebrity endorsed prosocial message and a control group shown a picture of the celebrity. Subjects, 88 young adults (younger than 25 years) enrolled in an introductory communications class at a mid-size university in the northeastern United States, were…

Graphic organizers such as webs, time lines, Venn diagrams, flowcharts, and concept maps are well known and widely used instructional and learning tools. They help teachers and students not only to identify and visually represent their views and knowledge but also to recognize and depict relationships among concepts. This article discusses the use…

This paper considers a group of preservice teachers' construction of concept maps derived from y = x + 5 and y = [pi]x[squared] with emphasis on their conceptual understanding of function. The two statements are perceived to represent a number of different concepts with indications of compartmentalized knowledge structures that might prevent the…

There is a growing consensus among educational researchers that traditional problem-based assessments are not effective tools for diagnosing a student's knowledge state and for guiding pedagogical intervention, and that new tools grounded in the results of cognitive science research are needed. The ConMap ("Conceptual Mapping") project, described…

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a large Arab, Muslim country in the Middle East. It has been an economic and political partner of the United States for many years. This unit, designed for elementary students, provides a text, questions, mapping skills, and fun activities. Students read about Saudi Arabia to gain insights and an appreciation of…

This report documents progress at the Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing (CRESST) on the feasibility of scoring concept maps using technology. CRESST, in its integrated simulation approach to assessment, has assembled a suite of performance assessment tasks (the integrated simulation) onto which they have mapped the…

Structural knowledge is a pre-requisite to valid performance assessment scores because structural knowledge leads to better transfer. Better transfer will cause consistency to occur between task performances for a given individual, and this consistency allows for less construct-irrelevant variance and more construct-relevant variance to be present…

Students (N=14) in a geomorphology course took an objective geomorphology test, the tree construction task, and the Standardized Concept Structuring Analysis Technique (SConSAT) version of concept mapping. Results suggest that the SConSAT knowledge structure dimensions have moderate to good construct validity. Contains 82 references. (DDR)