Adolescents with learning disabilities are not educated in a vacuum. Successful programming for these students involves many school professionals working together to integrate their programs for the benefit of students with learning disabilities. Collaborative teaming probably can best be described as an attitude rather than a certain way of…

The purpose of this study was to describe how one primary teacher of poor and working class rural students promoted small-group dialogue about books and literary concepts. Specifically, we focused on how she guided the students from the beginning of a lesson in ways that later led to dialogue during a videotaped four-day lesson sequence. We…

Guided by Shulman, 1986 and Shulman, 1987 tripartate model of teacher expertise [subject matter knowledge (SMK), pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and general pedagogical knowledge (GPK)], the present study examined 162 U.S. and Chinese 3rd grade mathematics teachers' expertise in teaching fractions. Results show that U.S. teachers lag…

The effect of the teaching and learning environment on the development of generic capabilities was examined through a survey of 1756 undergraduate students at a university in Hong Kong. The survey assessed students' perceptions of the development of the six capabilities of critical thinking, self-managed learning, adaptability, problem solving,…

The current study is framed within an ongoing effort of probing students' attitudes and expectations about knowing and learning physics, which has driven several investigations during the past decade. The questionnaire we developed focuses on physics students' views regarding a variety of specific learning activities, which are presented by title…

Researchers have suggested that among bilinguals, solving word problems in mathematics is influenced by linguistic factors (K. Durkin & B. Shire, 1991; L. Verschaffel, B. Greer, & E. De Corte, 2000). Others have suggested that students exhibit a strong tendency to exclude real-world constraints in solving mathematics word problems (L. Verschaffel,…

This article describes the ScienceStart! Curriculum, an early childhood curriculum that takes coherently organized science content as the hub of an integrated approach. ScienceStart! maps onto the typical preschool day and may be adapted for use in full-day or half-day preschool programs. It is designed to support the important developmental…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of actively categorizing math problems on the math problem solving performance of students with and without attention deficit disorder (ADD). To this purpose, 52 fifth and sixth grade students were involved in actively categorizing or noncategorizing (control) tasks followed by two problem…

From a very young age, shoes for boys tend to be wider than shoes for girls. Is this because boys have wider feet, or because it is assumed that girls are willing to sacrifice comfort for fashion, even in elementary school? To assess the former, a statistician measures kids' feet. (Contains 2 tables and 3 figures.)

Out of the 38 nations studied in the 1999 "Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study" (TIMSS), children in Singapore scored highest in mathematics (National Center for Education Statistics, NCES, 2003). Why do Singapore's children do so well in mathematics? The reasons are undoubtedly complex and involve social aspects.…

Instructors have long used short descriptive stories such as vignettes as a tool to model, teach, and research behavior and understanding as well as to stimulate discussion and problem solving in learning situations. This article summarizes the results of a study comparing the effectiveness of two types of vignettes (evaluation and synthesis) as…

Purpose: To illustrate the applicability of "kaizen" in higher education. Design/methodology/approach: "Kaizen" process was used for ten courses contained in a part-time executive MS degree program in management. Findings: "Kaizen" was found to be an effective process for improving graduate business school courses and the value proposition for…

The overall purpose of this paper is to describe a practical and useful approach to mathematics assessment that is meaningful to teachers, students and families. The format is highly flexible, yet specifically designed to provide detailed information as to the performance characteristics of the student and a variety of curricula and instructional…

While it has been suggested that patterning activities support early algebra learning, it is widely acknowledged that the shift from perceiving patterns to understanding algebraic functions--and correspondingly, from reporting empirical patterns to providing explanations--is difficult. This paper reports on the collaborations of grade 4 students…

Recently, many treatments for children with disabilities have shifted from a purely clinician-implemented model to one that focuses on a parent education component. In the current study, a repeated reversal design was employed to compare the effects of a parent education intervention that incorporates the principles outlined in the parent…