This study investigated whether elementary students could collectively advance a knowledge-building discourse through judgments of promisingness and epistemic reflection. Supported by the Promising Idea Tool and its accompanying pedagogical design, 32 grade six students were involved in judging the promisingness of their community ideas, refining…

This paper critiques the historical partnership between Education and Psychology in their coordinated search for theorizations of learning and teaching. Psychologists' construction of learning as an integrated set of processes (albeit complex and multifaceted) subserves the historical imperative of this preparadigmatic science to achieve…

The central thesis of this paper is that the philosophical systems survey provided by Morris and Pai (1976) in their text entitled "Philosophy and the American School" misrepresents the school of Thomism on several significant points. Though the authors' treatment of Thomistic metaphysics is judged to be adequate, their presentation of…

What is deemed to be socially relevant knowledge as it comes from social educational theorists and inquirers is not a singular conception. The prevailing notion that only pluralistic and relativist, or positivist epistemological concepts of truth adequately capture social education inquiry and products, and that claims to human action based on…

A descriptive study analyzed learners' use of comprehensive aids such as objectives and the glossary in a hypermedia tutorial. College students (n=101) read a short hypermedia tutorial on the topic of E. coli. Relationships between the use of the comprehension aids and individual characteristics such as metacognitive awareness and epistemic…

This paper advances the thesis that high level thinking in classrooms happens when students become conscious of experience and knowledge realities and decide to pursue them flexibly and creatively. The specific research focuses on the author's conviction that effective stimulators of student reflection will accommodate knowledge encounters that…

This paper reviews major stidues in metacognitive research relating to education and discusses their implications for educators and teacher education. Metacognition generally refers to self-awareness, or self knowledge of one's thought processes. Two types of research are discussed: (1) descriptive or correlational data on the natural development…

This study sought to determine if the Ways of Knowing Inventory (WOKI) was useful as a measure of intellectual/epistemological development among interns, cooperating teachers, and university supervisors who were engaged in a one-year student teaching experience. The WOKI is a 49-item questionnaire based on the epistemological positions described…

A theoretical framework is proposed to guide the reflective thinking of practitioners in the classroom. In this paper, the teacher's work is considered to be a series of acts intentionally performed for the educational benefit of all individuals interacting in the classroom. A discussion is presented on the theory of personal knowledge developed…

Higher order thinking is active and sustained cognitive effort directed at solving a complex problem and requires a student to integrate different sources of information, consider alternative perspectives, make critical judgments, and develop and test hypotheses. The important questions in higher order thinking are the ways learners incorporate…

This paper pursues three themes for understanding the nature of teaching and learning: (1) the mechanisms involved in teaching and learning as they occur in their normal context; (2) the processes and effects of a change whereby teachers and students assume greater personal awareness; and (3) the processes for facilitating change. Discussion…

This paper examines the problem that the beliefs with which preservice teachers leave colleges of education are virtually the same as when they entered. This issue is addressed by establishing that preservice teachers' belief formation regarding teaching, learning, students, and content should be a rational rather than nonrational or irrational…

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation as a fundamental human experience and activity. It is also the interpretation of meaning, the realization that human expression contains a meaningful component which must be recognized as such and transposed into one's own system of values and meanings. It describes what seems to happen in conversation,…

This brief review of how computers are currently being used and studied in the schools stresses ways in which computers will be used to enhance learning and development, and the need for research on computer learning to consider the multi-functional uses of computers in various contexts, instead of seeing it as a medium with a single effect on…

A collaborative research study was designed to facilitate, at the local school level, a mathematics teacher's development of a "constructivist" pedagogy. This paper discusses the nature and influence of the teacher's professional beliefs on his attempts to create a classroom learning environment congruent with the principles of a constructivist…