If a curriculum developer's goal is to create a single linear sequence of tasks that lead to the development of some important mathematical concept, then some researchers have suggested that these sequences should follow progressions similar to stages of development that have been identified in Piaget-like research on the relevant concept(s).…

The goal of education for sustainability (EFS) is "to develop in young people and adults new knowledge and new ways of thinking needed to achieve economic prosperity, participate democratically, secure justice and equity, and all the while regenerate the health of the ecosystems, the gift upon which all life and all production depend." The…

This study investigates how speakers of Dutch compute and produce relative time expressions. Naming digital clocks (e.g., 2:45, say ''quarter to three'') requires conceptual operations on the minute and hour information for the correct relative time expression. The interplay of these conceptual operations was investigated using a repetition…

The development of conceptual and procedural knowledge about counting was explored for children in kindergarten, Grade 1, and Grade 2 (N = 255). Conceptual knowledge was assessed by asking children to make judgments about three types of counts modeled by an animated frog: standard (correct) left-to-right counts, incorrect counts, and unusual…

This article illustrates the importance of nature experience for environmental knowledge, values and action. Recent empirical German research on the importance of nature experience will be analysed with regard to research foci, innovative research contributions and selected research results. Research deficits and challenges will be identified.…

When children learn categories, they do not learn isolated facts but rather systems of knowledge. These systems of knowledge are composed of property-property (e.g., things with wings tend to have feathers), property-role (e.g., things with eyes tend to eat), and role-role (e.g., things that eat tend to sleep) correlations. Research has shown that…

Distributed leadership is a concept that is finding increasing support and is receiving widespread interest in the practitioner and research communities. So, why the interest in distributed leadership? While reasons for the contemporary interest certainly vary, it is suggested that reasons for the popularity of "distributed leadership" are…

Strategic management courses focus on top managers' efforts to guide organizations to greater prosperity. Unfortunately, most undergraduate students lack experience with high organizational levels. As a result, such students often struggle to relate to and grasp strategic management concepts. The authors argue that classic literature offers…

Toddlers show a surprising lack of knowledge about solidity when they are asked to search for a ball that rolled behind a screen and stopped at a barrier whose top was visible above the screen. They search incorrectly, failing to take into account the position of the barrier. This study examined details of this failure by simplifying the task in 2…

For students to develop meaningful conceptions of fractions and fraction operations, they need to think of fractions in terms other than as just whole-number combinations. In this article, we suggest two powerful images for thinking about fractions that move beyond whole-number reasoning. (Contains 5 figures.)

The sublime is a theory of aesthetics that reached its highest popularity in British literature during the Romantic period (c. 1785-1832). This article (1) explicates philosophers' different meanings of the sublime; (2) show how the sublime is relevant to education; and (3) show how the sublime "works" in literature by analyzing William Blake's…

This article compares first-year university students' development of the concept of limits to mathematicians' historical development of the concept. The aim was to find out if students perceive the notion as mathematicians of the past did, as understandings of the concept evolved. The results imply that there are some similarities--for example,…

A rationale for the difference in the periodic trends in the ionization energy of the transition-metal elements versus the main-group elements is presented. The difference is that in the transition-metal elements, the electrons enter an inner-shell electron orbital, while in the main-group elements, the electrons enter an outer-shell electron…

This study extends ongoing work to identify difficult concepts in thermal and transport science and measure students' understanding of those concepts via a concept inventory. Two research questions provided the focal point: "What important concepts in electric circuits and engineering mechanics do students find difficult to learn?" and…

Taking its point of departure from some critical remarks about some of the most important recent theorising of learning, this article presents an alternative framework for theorising learning as a subjective process in a social and societal context, based on life history research. The key concepts of subjectivity and experience, derived from…