Blending narratives allows students to combine their personal experiences with specific social studies content to tell a story. Each story created and told by students is uniquely different. The primary purposes of blending narratives are to validate each student in the classroom and allow them to demonstrate knowledge of classroom content.…

This article provides support to college science instructors who wish to implement new strategies to probe student understanding, not to prescribe a single best way to conduct a college science course.

One of the defining characteristics of countries, such as the United Kingdom, with low social mobility are stark, persistent gaps in the school results between children from deprived backgrounds and their more advantaged counterparts. Far from acting as the great social leveler, education systems can perpetuate inequalities, and enable the…

In this interview-based project, the author examines the post-secondary transition of six predominantly home-schooled students who profess the importance of their Christian faith. The author analyzes their writing for hints about how they negotiate the ideologies of post-secondary education. He shows how home schooling has been characterized,…

This study is aimed at investigating students' annotation behaviors and their effects on learning achievement with pre-reading (reading before class) exercises and Web-based sharing mechanisms. An 8-week quasi-experiment was conducted with 125 sixth-grade elementary school students. The study shows the following results. First, a significant…

This study examined the impact of two epistemic commitments on the quality of college students' scientific reasoning in the domain of hydrostatics. These were the commitment to the consistency of theory with prior knowledge and commitment to the consistency of theory with evidence. Participants were 12 sophomore science majors enrolled in a large…

The use of RPL (Recognition of Prior Learning) in higher education to assess RPL candidates for admission into programmes of study met with a lot of criticism from faculty academics. Lecturers viewed the possibility of admitting large numbers of under-qualified adult learners, as a threat to the institution's reputation, or an erosion of academic…

How can the teacher bring about effective cooperative learning (CL) in multiethnic elementary classrooms? To answer this question we hypothesized that when the teacher stimulates pupils' helping behaviour (experimental group), this increases pupils' performance and CL motivation more than when the teacher lets pupils fend for themselves (control…

Cellular respiration and metabolism are topics that are reportedly poorly understood by students and judged to be difficult by many teachers. Although these topics may not be required learning areas in some high school biology curricula, a grasp of fundamental concepts of cellular metabolic processes is advantageous for students undertaking (or…

In this article, the authors argue that content misalignment is "not" a central problem in the preparation of future physical education teachers. The courses taught in most college curricula are generally relevant for professionals who will be teaching movement skills and exercise routines for enjoyment and healthful living to children. However,…

Much research has been done and reform is suggested relating to teachers' implementation of student-oriented learning environments, yet research on the role, beliefs, pedagogy, and knowledge of teachers simultaneously in classroom environments has been minimal (Kyle, 1994, "Journal of Research in Science Teaching", 31, 785-786). This…

We report on responses to a series of four questions designed to identify pre-existing abilities related to debugging and troubleshooting experiences of novice students before they begin programming instruction. The focus of these questions include general troubleshooting, bug location, exploring unfamiliar environments, and describing students'…

In this article, we describe the results of a study of chemistry high school teachers' beliefs (N = 7) of the chemistry curriculum and their roles, their beliefs on the teacher as developer of materials, and their beliefs about professional development. Teachers' beliefs influence the implementation of a curriculum. We view the use of a new…

This study explored the use of a problem-based learning (PBL) approach for teaching information and communication technology (ICT) skills to first-year students. Two questions were posed. The first addressed the ICT skill needs of 20 students enrolled in a first-year composition course. The second focused on the use of PBL to facilitate ICT skill…

The purpose of this study was to examine how prior knowledge of cellular transport influenced how high school students in the USA viewed and interpreted graphic representations of this topic. The participants were Advanced Placement Biology students (n = 65); each participant had previously taken a biology course in high school. After assessing…