The idea that "breaks from experience" are necessary in teacher learning is a response to the fact that teachers come to their preparation with set ideas about their work that tend to fit with the given. This paper examines justifications for such "breaks" centering, first, on the limitations of what teachers learn through experience and, second,…

This paper analyzes how philosophy enters into inquiry in teacher education, in writings by both philosophers and nonphilosophers. Examples illustrate philosophical activities (such as conceptual and logical analysis, positing and explaining distinctions, evoking shared ideas and values), as well as showing that philosophy plays an important part…

Preliminary evidence indicates that children begin to generalize knowledge in a new way at approximately 3 years of age. Forty children between 1.5 and 3.5 years of age were given two tasks of graded complexity. The first and simpler task used four nonoverlapping classes, each composed of four identical objects. Two of the classes were tagged with…

Research on loneliness and research on social support offer complementary perspectives on how social relationships affect health and well being. However, despite considerable overlap, loneliness and lack of social support reflect deficits of different kinds of social exchanges and these deficits have distinct consequences for well being. Social…

What advanced 4- and 5-year-old children know about night and day in relationship to the earth and sun was studied to test the hypothesis that two teaching activities would help children to understand the cause of the phenomenon. Participants were 21 middle to upper class boys and girls enrolled in a part-time early childhood enrichment program…

Relationships between infant visual skills and the development of object permanence and expressive language skills were examined with 31 infants in three groups: visually typical, visually atypical, and Down Syndrome. Measures used to evaluate visual status were: forced preferential looking, optokinetic nystagmus, and behavioral. Object permanence…

The practicum designed a perceptual activities program for learning disabled second graders using computer-assisted instruction. The program develops skills involving visual motor coordination, figure-ground differentiation, form constancy, position in space, and spatial relationships. Five behavioral objectives for each developmental area were…

This paper describes the acquisition of basic economic concepts by two fifth-grade classes in an elementary school through the use of a school store. The paper contains: (1) a review of the literature relating to economics education and the use of simulations; (2) a discussion of two teachers' approaches to teaching economic concepts; and (3) a…

Health professionals and educators should develop their abilities to educate about death and to comfort the bereaved. Due to lower death rates, the lack of philosophical religious views, and distorted perceptions of death contributed by television, death has become a mystery instead of a segment of the common experience. Particularly when a child…

A three-part study compared similarity-based learning (in which concepts are formed based on similarity among multiple examples) and explanation-based learning (in which general schema are acquired from a single example) in schema acquisition. Subjects, 16 undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology courses at the University of Illinois and…

Advanced knowledge acquisition in a subject area is different in many important ways from introductory learning (and from expertise). In this paper some of the special characteristics of advanced learning of complex conceptual material are discussed. The paper notes that these characteristics are often at odds with the goals and tactics of…

The purpose of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) Learning Style Profile is to provide educators with a well-validated and easy-to-use instrument for diagnosing the cognitive styles, perceptual response tendencies, and study/instructional preferences of middle level and senior high school students. The Learning Style…

An overview of the research on the cognitive effects of higher education is presented. It is suggested that studies exist on three levels: (1) measurement of the increment of specific factual knowledge; (2) understanding the basic concepts in a certain area, studied by qualitative analysis; and (3) the development of awareness of the nature of…

This study investigated the effects of using two microcomputer games to help children in grades 4 to 6 develop and apply concepts of probability. To achieve the object of the games, a player should choose moves ("captures") so that the probability of recapture by an opponent is minimized. Questions addressed included whether students…

Some research indicates that a number of children understand vision as an outreaching of the sense, and that they are the originator of the process (Eaton, Anderson, & Smith, 1983; Guesne, 1985). The children draw arrows or rays that point out of the eyes, sometimes returning to the head, and write that vision involves the eyes seeing or…