Although home education is a growing phenomenon in many Western countries, it is almost non-existent in the Netherlands. Under Dutch educational law, children must be educated in the school system. Home schooling is thought to endanger children's development. This study examines--primarily American--analyses of performance in home schooling. Its…

Beginning teachers in Northern Ireland and the United States conducted structured inquiry projects in which they investigated elementary children's understanding of history and social studies. Interviews with the teachers and analysis of their written assignments indicate that these investigations challenged their beliefs about children's prior…

Two experiments tested predictions from a theory in which processing load depends on relational complexity (RC), the number of variables related in a single decision. Tasks from six domains (transitivity, hierarchical classification, class inclusion, cardinality, relative-clause sentence comprehension, and hypothesis testing) were administered to…

Research during the past decade lends support to the notion that visual as well as phonological deficits are significantly correlated with reading and learning disorders. However, from the variety of visual anomalies discussed, it soon becomes evident that vision, itself, is not a unitary disorder. In this review, the multifaceted nature of…

A follow-up account of a mother's attempts to provide her blind daughter, now aged six, with knowledge of the physical world through the manipulation of three-dimensional objects and two-dimensional tactile representations. The case is made for the value of pictures to the development of children's understanding in general; and for the child who…

Relapse and recurrence in adolescent depression are important problems. Much less is known about relapse prevention compared to the acute treatment of depression in adolescents. Based on previous research, theoretical predictions, and clinical experience, the Treatment for Adolescents With Depression Study (TADS) protocol was designed to determine…

This article suggests that conventional methods of teaching may, at best, create pseudo-experts--students whose expertise, to the extent they have it, does not mirror the expertise needed for real-world thinking inside or outside of the academic disciplines schools normally teach. It is suggested that teaching for "successful intelligence" may…

There is no debate about the natural, normal, unique, and lifelong process of the grief of the death of a loved one. The loss is an intensely individualized experience. Yet, given an understanding of human growth and development, some general predictions about the concept of death and the grief reaction can be made based upon common patterns of…

Extrapolating from current developmental theory and using practice-to-theory/theory-to-practice methods, the authors propose a framework for individual diversity development among faculty, staff, and students. The model offers individuals in-depth cognitive, affective and behavioral frameworks of development toward consciously valuing complex and…

In this article, the author gives a general introduction of a few ideas on cognitive development in children. In the first part, he deals with the topic of development, a process which concerns the totality of the structures of knowledge. He reviews the stages of development of operational structures, distinguishes four main stages of development,…

In this article, the author emphasizes that the fundamental goal of environmental education in middle school is to establish the correct environmental awareness by teaching students that is vital to our survival to love nature and to take care of the environment. In other words, one should help students establish the correct outlook on nature,…

The focus of this literature search is whether, and if so to what extent, arts participation can be shown to advance cognitive and personal/social outcomes for school pupils who participate, and the possible subsequent positive effects on the more academic aspects of school life such as achievement and attainment. The generally held belief that…

Searching for an adequate method to investigate human development (especially the development of theoretical thinking) Vygotsky and his collaborators developed the causal genetic method. The basic idea of this method consists in the investigation of psychic functions and structures by their formation under controlled conditions (for instance via a…

To gauge the civic knowledge and skills of the nation's 4th-, 8th-, and 12th-grade students, an assessment has been scheduled for 2006 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This assessment will enable NAEP to report on trends in civics achievement from 1998 to 2006. The National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), NAEP's…

Activity Based Intervention (ABI) is an approach used in many early childhood programs serving the special needs of young children and their families. The purpose of this article is to present theoretical underpinnings of ABI, and discusses theory-based ABI practices. ABI draws upon multiple and varied theories which in turn inform practice. At…