In the Western world, a paradigm exists that sees environment treated as one extreme of an adversarial binary, balanced in opposition to society. This paradigm, which I call the "environment/society disconnect," infiltrates the secondary school system, leading to serious deficiencies in how students understand the social dimensions of…

From the late nineteenth century through the early 1930s a succession of collectors, ethnologists, and other scholars scoured the Menominee Reservation for data and items of material culture, which they presented to the American public through both publication and display. They did this with the cautious aid of Menominees they hired to provide…

Remember the time when all you had to do was memorize these five steps: ask a question, formulate a hypothesis, perform experiment, collect data, and draw conclusions? And you received full credit for defining the scientific method. Well, those days are gone. This article discusses why the "scientific method ain't what it used to be." (Contains 2…

Two experiments examined whether inconsistent effects of analogies in promoting new content learning from text are related to prior knowledge of the analogy "per se." In Experiment 1, college students who demonstrated little understanding of weather systems and different levels of prior knowledge (more vs. less) of an analogous everyday…

This research review is dedicated to the memory of William Safire (1929-2009). A visionary leader, Safire brought other visionaries, researchers, educators, artists, and policymakers together to explore the confluence of arts education and neuroscience. He fostered the new field of neuroeducation in his work as chair of The Dana Foundation in…

The meaning of Lorentz contraction in special relativity and its connection with Bell's spaceships parable is discussed. The motion of Bell's spaceships is then compared with the accelerated motion of a rigid body. We have tried to write this in a simple form that could be used to correct students' misconceptions due to conflicting earlier…

The measurement of the mass, or the density, of air can easily be done with very simple materials and offers many interesting phenomena for discussion--buoyancy and its effects being the most obvious but not the only one. Many interesting considerations can be done regarding the behavior of gases, the effect of the external conditions in the…

Comments on the critiques of Tryon (2009a, this issue) and Cunningham (2009, this issue). These critiques provide an interesting contrast: one favoring greater reductionism and one favoring less. I consider each in turn. Tryon (2009a) again has addressed the issue of mechanisms in these pages (cf. Tryon, 2009b). The concepts of function and…

We describe an experiment which enables the observation of longitudinal magnification for the real image of a three-dimensional (3D) object formed by a converging lens. The experiment also shows the absence of longitudinal inversion. Possible reasons for misconceptions with respect to real images and longitudinal inversions are discussed and a…

As a fundamental resource, textbooks shape the way we teach and learn mathematics. Based on examination of secondary school and university textbooks, we describe to what extent, and how, the presentation of mathematics material--in our case study, the concept of the line tangent to the graph of a function--could contribute to creation and…

The Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate (CPED)--which the College of Education and Social Services (CESS) at the University of Vermont has actively been involved in since 2007--has invited us to think carefully about our EdD doctoral program and its role in the improvement of schools and society. Although the EdD program in Educational…

Masaki Oda is a Professor of Applied Linguistics at Tamagawa University in Tokyo, Japan, specializing in Sociopolitical Aspects of Language Use. Prof. Oda got his PhD program from Georgetown University, where he also taught Japanese for several years. He returned to Japan in 1990 and began teaching EFL and training EFL teachers at Tamagawa…

Middle school is a crucial transition period for students as they move from concrete to algebraic ways of thinking. This article describes a sequence of instruction geared toward helping prospective middle school instructors teach the topic of percentages.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the experiences of a Hispanic undocumented high school graduate in Texas (USA) that did not attend a higher education institution in spite of her desire to do. Using qualitative research and narrative analysis, the researcher conducted three interview levels with the participant and developed an emplotted…

Students are frequently presented with novel visualizations introducing scientific concepts and processes normally unobservable to the naked eye. Despite being unfamiliar, students are expected to understand and employ the visualizations to solve problems. Domain experts exhibit more competency than novices when using complex visualizations, but…