Over the past few years evidence-based practice has become of central concern to health and social services in this country. The fundamental tenant is that there must be a clear link between professional practice and its research base. This paper outlines the concept of evidence-based practice and how it rests on the concept of good quality…

Dialogue is an encounter between two or more human beings. We will consider how some scientists, philosophers and religious scholars have looked at dialogue and attempt to learn from each tradition while seeing this encounter under the umbrella of "Systems theory", related to thermodynamics and flavored with Buddhist philosophy. The process of…

Given that enhancing the motivation of young people for science is a widely shared goal, the question posed is how to raise intellectual satisfaction among students by showing the consistency and conciseness of physical theories. I argue that certain rituals in our teaching practices can make physical theories seem inconsistent, even absurd. Using…

Differences in attitudes and behaviors, regularly exhibited between youth and their elders, are frequently referred to as the "generation gap". On the job, these generational distinctions are becoming increasingly complex as "multi-generation gaps" emerge, with three or more generations defining roles and expectations, each vying for positions in…

This study explores the musical content and human processes of improvisations of children and adults using the phenomenological lenses of time, space and responsivity. Paired improvisational performances of two late-career adult composers and two 7-year-old children were analysed considering a lifespan-related perspective involving the origins of…

The purpose of this study was twofold. First, it was aimed to identify Turkish pre-service physics teachers' knowledge and understanding of the Moon, Moon phases, and other lunar phenomena. Second, the effects of model-based teaching on pre-service teachers' conceptions were examined. Conceptions were proposed as mental models in this study. Four…

Scholars in the field of communication theory and research have ignored and problematized the relationship between sign and meaning. This paper discusses the relationship in order to catalogue the different positions taken and to investigate the work that gets done from these positions. In the "brute sense data" or physicalist position, the…

This research focused on preservice elementary teachers' understanding and reconstruction of understanding about multiplication in the domain of fractions. At the start of the study, 44% of the 50 preservice teachers studied reported that they had a method for reasoning about multiplication with fractions, and 28% were able to describe a situation…

The challenge to the dominance of rationality in educational philosophy presented by John Dewey and Donald Schon is examined in this paper. The paper identifies basic assumptions of their perspective and explains concepts of reflective thinking, which include biography, context of uncertainty, and "not-yet." A model of reflective thought…

This paper expands on schematic theory through a review of recent work in the field of semiotics. Content and formal schemata are shown to be grounded respectively in perceptual (abductive) and indexical (inductive) strategies of inference. A third kind of schemata is based on deductive generalization and referred to as abstract schemata. All…

One principal's criterion for proper decision-making information may be much different from that of another. Information providers need to decide what constitutes relevant information when communicating to decision-makers. Fifty-three principals and 11 assistant principals were administered two indicator tests to investigate the relationship…

This project addressed the question: What knowledge and processes enable individuals to construct and modify representations of novel, nonroutine problems? The theoretical goal was to extend the information-processing theory of problem solving to include processes that have been characterized as restructuring of problems and productive thinking by…

A study examined whether word processing amplifies writing performance and whether it restructures the process of writing. Sixteen college students wrote a short essay in a single session on either a word processor or in longhand. The quality of the essays was assessed by trained judges who rated their content and style. Text analysis methods were…

Two divergent approaches to a prison educational program attempt to go beyond accreditation or amusement and address instead attitude change, human choice, judgment, and empowerment. The first, most obvious approach, focuses on the provision of knowledge. The second approach starts with a focus on individual development. Its aim is to facilitate…

This paper describes the Structure-Mapping Engine (SME), a cognitive simulation program for studying human analogical processing. SME is based on Gentner's Structure-Mapping theory of analogy, and provides a "tool kit" for constructing matching algorithms consistent with this theory. This flexibility enhances cognitive simulation studies by…