Children want to explore, dig, build, play, and wonder. To do this they need to touch, feel, see, observe, listen, manipulate, plan, and create. How does a teacher build and maintain a learning environment that will help students investigate meaningful questions? How does a teacher plan and manage ongoing investigations? How does a teacher use…

Is a "fair test" the only way to carry out science investigations? Many children (and primary teachers) following the National Curriculum in England and Wales would answer "yes" to this question. This is because fair test investigations have historically been promoted in national assessment, published curricula, schemes of work…

Remarkable advances in instructional communication technology (ICT) have now made it possible to provide high levels of enrichment services to students online. This paper describes an Internet-based enrichment program based on a high-end learning theory that focuses on the development of creative productivity through the "application" of knowledge…

The Personal Inquiry project is an investigation into the role that technologies can play in enabling effective inquiry. While it is generally agreed that inquiry-based learning has potential for student learning, especially in science, three main challenges remain. The first is to provide effective support for inquiry learning, for both students…

Insects are fascinating creatures--especially when you and your students get up close and personal with them! To that end, the authors facilitated an inquiry-based investigation with an emphasis on identification of the different types of insects found in the school yard, their characteristics, their habitat, and what they eat, while engaging the…

Like peanut butter and jelly, kindergarteners and dinosaurs go well together. Therefore, the authors developed a cross-curricular unit based on the books "All Aboard the Dinotrain" (Lund and Fine 2006) and "Dinosailors" (Lund and Fine 2003). Dinosaur learning centers were used to engage students and address the National Science Education Standards…

Learning about what inferences are, and what a good inference is, will help students become more scientifically literate and better understand the nature of science in inquiry. Students in K-4 should be able to give explanations about what they investigate (NSTA 1997) and that includes doing so through inferring. This article provides some tips…

The messages students receive through popular media such as movies, television, the internet, and music videos have a powerful influence and can shape their thinking. A national survey of media use by 8- to 18-year-olds found the average adolescent spends over seven and a half hours daily with entertainment media (KFF 2010). Rather than viewing…

Hemispheric asymmetry implies the existence of developmental influences that affect one hemisphere more than the other. However, those influences are poorly understood. One simple view is that asymmetry may exist because of a relationship between a mental process' degree of lateralization and how well it functions. Data scaling issues have largely…

Fertility rates have fallen dramatically around the world. In some countries, there are no longer enough children being born to replace adult populations. The disappearance of children is a matter of concern matched only by fears that childhood is becoming too structured or not structured enough, too short or too long, or just simply too different…

Discusses the origins, makeup, and activities of child death review teams (CDRTs) used in 21 states in the states' quest to solve cases involving the suspicious death of a child. Advocates the creation of CDRTs in states which do not have them. (MDM)

It is easy to take for granted that children often work together in groups unproblematically on practical science tasks. However, after a recent exercise in a small rural church school the authors realised that they had not considered fully the limitations they would encounter with group work. They had spent four one-hour sessions working with a…

An innovative collaboration between the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education encourages new questions to be asked of ancient objects. In the museum galleries children work directly from ancient Egyptian objects through activities designed to encourage questioning that unpicks the technologies of the…

This article provides a review of various psychotropic agents employed for children and adolescents with externalizing disorders. With the exception of the stimulants, clinical use of psychotropic medications for children with externalizing disorders far exceeds the available empirical literature. Further, there are insufficient data pertaining to…

The core idea that we argued for in the target article was that grammatical processing in a second language (L2) is fundamentally different from grammatical processing in one's native (first) language (L1). Our major source of evidence for this claim comes from experimental psycholinguistic studies investigating morphological and syntactic…