To reduce curricular fragmentation in science education, reform recommendations include using common, unifying themes such as scaling to enhance curricular coherence. This study involved 215 participants from five groups (grades 5, 7, 9, and 12, and doctoral students), who completed written assessments and card sort tasks related to their…

A formative assessment pretest was administered to undergraduate students at the beginning of a science course in order to find out their prior knowledge, misconceptions and learning difficulties on the topic of the human respiratory system and energy issues. Those findings could provide their instructors with the valuable information required in…

The purpose of this study was to examine changes in personal science teaching self-efficacy (PSTE), outcome expectancy (STOE), and science conceptual understanding and relationships among these in preservice teachers. Seventy preservice teachers enrolled in science teaching methods courses participated in this study. PSTE, STOE, and science…

The strategies in this book, geared for students from grades 4-8, are designed to bring literature to life for students, and to encourage students to become lifelong readers. The first section of the book presents four "'Into' Activities" that are designed to get students excited and curious about what they are about to read and to build students'…

A program was designed and implemented to improve student vocabulary and comprehension. The target population consisted of 59 students in grades 1, 2, and 3 in a low-income area of a large city in central Illinois. The problems of lack of prior knowledge, poor vocabulary, and insufficient comprehension were documented through data collected from…

Designed to offer a balanced instructional approach for language arts, this book combines a systematic phonics program with whole language. It teaches reading skills by using the children's own language, basal readers, poems, and songs, and by emphasizing writing, spelling, listening, and speaking skills. The book includes daily lesson plans,…

This paper proposes an integrative approach for teaching English as a second language to students in Hong Kong to develop their listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills in English to meet the challenge of an English curriculum. The integrative approach provides an authentic language environment for learners to develop language skills in a…

The Defense Activity for Nontraditional Education Support (DANTES) Program is a testing service conducted by the Educational Testing Service for DANTES, an agency of the Department of Defense. DANTES' mission is to help service members obtain credit for knowledge and skills acquired through non-traditional educational experiences. Since World War…

A study examined how students make specific inferences from prose passages. Subjects, 44 first- and second-year college students and 40 seventh-grade students, read 3 prose passages, each containing 6 inferential questions. The premise information for each question was expressed in one of six deductive inference forms: transitive, exclusive…

This study examined factors that influenced the acquisition of pedagogical content knowledge for two groups of prospective secondary mathematics teachers (undergraduate mathematics majors and post-graduate scientists and engineers seeking mathematics certification) in the content domain of functions and graphs. Both groups, enrolled in a…

Nontraditional education credits can be earned in many ways. Some methods of assessing learning for credit are objective, such as standardized texts; others are more objective, such as a review of life experiences. Options for earning a high school diploma without spending 4 years in a classroom are as follows: General Educational Development…

A study investigated what conscious listening strategies second language learners use when listening to authentic texts. Subjects were six college students of intermediate Spanish. They listened to three authentic audio and three authentic video texts. The introspective commentaries of the subjects on one of the video texts are discussed here.…

This paper describes the third phase of a multi-year study that has been assessing professional knowledge and perceptions of beginning teacher education students. This phase of the study reports on responses to a questionnaire designed to compare student knowledge across cohorts and institutions. The data reported here are from a total of 291…

Preservice teachers enter formal studies of teaching with an array of personal history-based beliefs and about teaching, classrooms, and students. This report traces the interactions between preservice teachers' personal history-based lay knowledge and their decisions about the potential value of coursework-based principles of content area reading…

Use of metacognitive strategies, creative problem solving, and creative thinking techniques in intermediate grade writing instruction can promote students' thinking and creativity. Metacognitive strategies can help students attack the writing task in an orderly fashion. Answering specific questions for descriptive, expository, narrative, or…