Focuses on how conceptual themes can assist students in problem solving by acting as organizing elements and guides for thinking. States that students can learn how to use important ideas to drive key questions, discern the relationships among concepts that reflect the operation of principles, and visualize a problem to clarify essential issues.…

Focuses on problem-based curriculum students' generation of learning issues that are guidelines for their individual study. Investigates how many learning issues can be classified as being of good quality and presents examples of well and poorly formulated ones. (DDR)

This paper is about a longitudinal study to investigate how student-teachers developed understanding of some key ecological concepts during a teacher education programme. Another aim was to interpret the student-teachers' intentions in respect of the programme and to examine how these intentions influenced their learning. A group of students were…

This article is a response to the critique by Joseph Maxwell on the article written by these authors entitled "Scholars Before Researchers: On the Centrality of the Dissertation Literature Review in Research Preparation". Maxwell argues that dissertations should emulate research articles and include a conceptual framework that only discusses…

Although research from a developmental/psychological perspective indicates that many children do not have a scientific understanding of living things, even by the age of 10 years, little research has been conducted about how students learn this science topic in the classroom. This exploratory research used a case-study design and qualitative…

Fourth-grade students who participated in a yearlong, whole-class teaching experiment not only reconceptualized natural numbers but also generated flexible solution strategies to perform numerical computations mentally and in writing. Students' reconceptualization of number was mediated by their perceived resemblance between the physical action of…

This article describes a unit of instruction designed to promote a conceptual understanding of area in sixth-grade students. Students used benchmarks to estimate the areas of real houses and calculated the areas of houses based on building plans. (Contains 7 figures.)

This chapter proposes a conceptual framework for understanding influences on faculty work and for conducting research about individual, organizational, and epistemological factors that may shape faculty members' engagement in public scholarship. (Contains 1 figure.)

Relying on interviews with 34 doctoral students from three public research universities, we explore graduate students' perceptions of faculty life. Schema theory informs our understanding of the immutability of students' "script of the ideal," an immutability that suggests the graduate student socialization process may be less powerful than often…

The current research investigates infants' perception of a novel object from a category that is familiar to young infants: key rings. We ask whether experiences obtained outside the lab would allow young infants to parse the visible portions of a partly occluded key ring display into one single unit, presumably as a result of having categorized it…

The purpose of this study was to determine the immediate and long-term effectiveness of a university level conceptually-based health-related (CBHR) fitness course on health-related fitness (HRF) knowledge. Two hundred and seventy-seven students served as subjects. Subjects were grouped according to the following criteria. Group 1 represented…

Although there have always been people considered to have mental retardation (MR), the category has proven surprisingly difficult to define adequately. This is because it includes a subcategory of mild MR whose members are part of a larger population of marginally competent people, some of whom may be considered to have other forms of disability…

Post-productivism is a contested concept, and some argue that it should be abandoned. In this paper, a more focused definition for post-productivism is suggested. Evidence for change in forestry and agriculture that could be categorised as post-productivist is presented, in relation to both the narrower definition and to characterisations…

This study investigates the potential of enhancing students' learning of difficult science concepts by exploring the interaction between teachers' four different instructional approaches and students' four different learning preference styles. Students' immediate performance and their retention for learning of buoyancy concepts serve to examine…

This research study was conducted in Trinidad and Tobago to investigate students' responses to a summative assessment of a cross-cultural unit of work. The unit was designed to help students learn Western science by building bridges between their traditional practices and beliefs on selected health-related matters and conventional science…