This study investigates the approaches adopted by students to a university writing programme designed to help them learn first-year undergraduate science. The research design includes phenomenographic analyses of 19 interviews and 50 open-ended questionnaires, as well as quantitative analyses of the qualitative data. The main results of the study…

This paper outlines the development of a framework--the Science in Schools (SiS) Components--that describes effective science teaching and learning and that has become a central focus for the Science in Schools Research project that is being implemented in 225 Australian schools. The description is in a form that provides a basis for monitoring…

This paper reports upon a study addressing teaching and learning about solubility to Turkish first-year secondary school students (age 14-15). The principal aim of the research was to investigate the impact on students' understanding of solubility, of introducing a simple particle model of matter. A teaching intervention to fit within the existing…

In light of today's dynamic health care delivery system, nursing education cannot be passive and still produce competent and effective registered nurses. Registered nurses must be able to communicate confidently in order to advocate for their patients and themselves. The nursing faculty at Seminole Community College have accepted the challenge to…

Ms. Johnson was concerned about the inconsistent performance of several of her students in solving mathematical word problems. A number of her students were one to two grade levels below their grade placement in reading, spoke English as a second language, and had identified reading disabilities. On mathematics assignments that required minimal…

Science content area texts are difficult for most middle school students, particularly whose reading skills are below grade level. This article describes an innovative approach to integrating the teaching of middle school science content and reading skills to increase levels of student success with content area textbooks. For reading instruction,…

We seek to demonstrate how digital video technology can contribute towards our understanding of the process of development of conceptual understanding in physics. We use digital video to analyze 4 brief Physics by Inquiry sessions with 2 groups of preservice teachers. The instances include independent group work and instructor-student…

Educational programmes should promote an ethos of lifelong learning and develop in graduates the capacity for long-term personal and professional development through self-learning and reflection. A business degree programme should seek to produce graduates who are confident, creative thinkers with the capacity to solve problems, think creatively,…

Summary Street is educational software based on latent semantic analysis (LSA), a computer method for representing the content of texts. The classroom trial described here demonstrates the power of LSA to support an educational goal by providing automatic feedback on the content of students' summaries. Summary Street provides this feedback in an…

Activity structures such as classroom lessons and initiation-reply-evaluation sequences are important cultural tools that help students and teachers accomplish everyday activity, but they are not well adapted to open-ended inquiry conducted by students in small groups with teacher guidance. In this research, I identified alternative activity…

The evaluation of developmental interventions has been hampered by a lack of practical, reliable, and objective developmental assessment systems. This article describes the construction of a domain-general computerized developmental assessment system for texts: the Lexical Abstraction Assessment System (LAAS). The LAAS provides assessments of the…

Two key components of recent educational reform are (a) new attention to writing as an important academic skill, and (b) the establishment of national and state standards for student achievement. State standards for writing vary considerably in their form and specificity. Many are not listed separately but are included within integrated language…

This research examined the effectiveness in an urban school district of 2 of the most widely used Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) programs-Direct Instruction (DI), implemented in 9 district elementary schools, and Success for All (SFA), implemented in 2 elementary schools. In examining impacts on student achievement and school change outcomes…

As part of a discussion of cognition-based assessment (CBA) for elementary school mathematics, I describe assessment tasks for area and volume measurement and a research-based conceptual framework for interpreting students' reasoning on these tasks. At the core of this conceptual framework is the notion of levels of sophistication. I provide…

The complex nature of written expression presents difficulty for many students, particularly those with learning disabilities (LD). The literature in the area of written expression and students with learning disabilities indicates that explicit, rule-based instruction can enhance the writing skills of struggling students. Research in Direct…