Over the last 5 centuries, successive generations of educators have engaged in a reevaluation of curriculum and pedagogy in an effort to reveal the mechanisms that underlie the mysteries of the educational process. The current debate in the USA over the nature of pedagogical reform, particularly in terms of teacher accountability, high-stakes…

This study focuses on the mapping of events onto verb-argument structures in British Sign Language (BSL). The development of complex sentences in BSL is described in a group of 30 children, aged 3;2-12;0, using data from comprehension measures and elicited sentence production. The findings support two interpretations: firstly, in the mapping of…

The purpose of this research study was to (a) describe how concept mapping can be used as an integral instructional strategy for teaching a college course in evolution, (b) evaluate the utility of incorporating concept mapping in a college course on evolution, (c) determine whether students' concept maps reveal "critical junctures" in learning as…

Male students in the Gaza Strip (n=30, median age 13) used concept mapping to generate propositional relationships among map concepts; 31 controls received lectures. Concept mapping resulted in significantly higher achievement. (SK)

Inscriptions are central to the practice of science. Previous studies showed, however, that preservice teachers even those with undergraduate degrees in science, generally do not spontaneously produce inscriptions that economically summarize large amounts of data. This study was designed to investigate the production of inscription while a group…

The purpose of this study is to use concept maps as an "expressed model" to investigate students' mental models regarding the homeostasis of blood sugar. The difficulties in learning the concept of homeostasis and in probing mental models have been revealed in many studies. Homeostasis of blood sugar is one of the themes in junior high…

This research aims to use hierarchical topic maps to compile digital learning material and to discuss its design and application possibilities. The system renders tremendous original assets and then embeds a self-organizing map (SOM) in the material database to produce topical learning materials, as in this case, an illustration through Chinese…

There are two main claims in this article. First, that the classic pillars of engineering education, namely, traditional mathematics and differential equations, are merely a particular, if not old-fashioned, representation of a broader mathematical vision, which spans from Turing machine programming and symbolic productions sets to sub-symbolic…

Most researchers agree that psychological/educational tests are sensitive to multiple traits, implying the need for a multidimensional item response theory (MIRT). One limitation of applying a MIRT in practice is the difficulty in establishing equivalent scales of multiple traits. In this study, a new MIRT linking method was proposed and evaluated…

Reading in content areas is generally difficult for English-language learners (ELLs), but reading in social studies is particularly challenging for ELLs for several reasons. First, ELLs often lack background information that textbook authors assume readers have. Second, ELLs in the process of learning a new language do not have…

In this essay, the author "maps" a town that has grown in what was formerly frontier: he looked at twenty-four essays focusing on grammar instruction from "Teaching English in the Two-Year College (TETYC)," published between 1987 and 2006, with a goal of identifying key areas of focus--town squares. While he found several trends and foci, most…

The "Literacies for Learning in Further Education" (LfLFE) research project has been funded for three years from January 2004 as part of Phase 3 of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme in the UK. The project involves collaboration between two universities and four further education (FE) colleges. The intention is to investigate…

In this study we measured changes in science teachers' conceptual science understanding (content knowledge) and pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) while participating in a problem-based learning (PBL) model of professional development. Teachers participated in a two-week long workshop followed by nine monthly meetings during one academic year…

Ecological teaching models and evidence of success in public schools may be lacking. We created a constructivist ecological model using the animé Nausicaa with fourth graders in a Scottsdale, Arizona school. The animé involves the epic adventure, good and evil battle to affect the future of the human race. We documented results using…

Determining students' knowledge structure is important for assessing what a learner knows about a domain of knowledge. Traditional assessment methods are not always appropriate for exploring students' knowledge structure and changes during the learning period. This study investigates how the existing knowledge structure of the learners interacts…