This paper reports on a small-scale pilot study undertaken at a secondary school in England, exploring how children learn about and construct distant places. Using drawings, concept mapping and interviews, the research examines the process of learning about Brazil over a period of formal learning, and how teaching and resources influence…

Mental-content verbs such as "think," "believe," "imagine" and "hope" seem to pose special problems for the young language learner. One possible explanation for these difficulties is that the concepts that these verbs express are hard to grasp and therefore their acquisition must await relevant conceptual development. According to a different,…

The influence the counsellor has on his or her clients is problematic both theoretically and practically. This article explores how counsellors in six focus groups talked about counsellor influence in response to a series of scenarios and questions. The counsellors adopted three main, or "core", positions about influence: "counsellors shouldn't…

To explore the ways in which teacher-guided and student-centered instructional approaches influence students' conceptual understanding of seasonal change, we designed a technology-enhanced learning (TEL) course to compare, by means of concept maps, the learning outcome of students in two groups: a teacher-guided (TG) class (with whole-class…

The field of instructional design has traditionally treated concepts as discrete learning outcomes. Theoretically, learning concepts requires correctly isolating and applying attributes of specific objects into their correct categories. Similarity views of concept learning are unable to account for all of the rules governing concept formation,…

Outlines an account of conceptual learning in terms of the conceptions that people hold, the status they award to their conceptions, and the conceptual ecology containing the criteria they use in determining status. (Author/CCM)

Electronic game technologies can prepare novice learners for future learning of complex concepts. This paper describes the underlying instructional design, learning science, cognitive science, and game theory. A structural, or syntactic mapping (structure mapping), approach to game design can produce a game world relationally isomorphic to a…

In most teacher education courses, instructional strategies are merely listed and explained. Students rarely have the opportunity to see these strategies in use until they become student teachers. What better way to teach secondary instructional strategies to pre-service teachers than by modeling these strategies using teacher education content?…

Pupils with autism often present significant challenges to teachers. They seem to have real strengths in visual processing but a cognitive style that encourages them to focus on detail rather than the overarching connections between concepts. Veronica Roberts, currently undertaking doctoral training at the Institute of Education, University of…

Examined conceptualizations of 11 experienced and 12 novice counselors, with respect to general counseling process and specific client concerns by means of a two-part conceptual mapping task (CMT). Found an interaction effect of counselor experience and generality of conceptual task on extensiveness of counselor conceptualizations. (ABL)

This study describes 5th, 8th, and 11th-grade students', teachers', and medical professionals' conceptions of flu and microbial illness. Participants constructed a concept map on "flu" and participated in a semi-structured interview. The results showed that these groups of students, teachers and medical professionals held and structured their…

Finds that the construction of concept maps may help students make links between scientific concepts and related topic areas. Describes different methods of concept map analysis which illustrate different levels of conceptual development. (CCM)

Although researchers in higher education propose alternatives to traditional approaches to assessment, traditional methods are commonly used in college or university science courses. The purpose of this study was to explore the feasibility and validity of Prospective Science Teachers' (PSTs) concept maps as authentic assessment tools in a…

High-stakes accountability policies such as the federal No Child Left Behind legislation require districts and schools to use data to measure progress toward standards. In doing so, such policies assume that practitioners can and will use data to enhance decisionmaking and improve teaching and learning. However, educators use and make sense of…

Since the publication of Fodor's (1983) The Modularity of Mind, there have been quite a few discussions of cognitive modularity among cognitive scientists. Generally, in those discussions, modularity means a property of specialized cognitive processes or a domain-specific body of information. In actuality, scholars understand modularity in many…