The technology principle in the "Principles and Standards for School Mathematics" (NCTM, 2000) states that technology plays an important role in how teachers teach mathematics and in how students learn mathematics. The purpose of this sequential explanatory mixed methods study was to examine the impact of interactive applets on students'…

Five Canadian high school Chemistry classes in one school, taught by three different teachers, studied the concepts of dynamic chemical equilibria and Le Chatelier's Principle. Some students received traditional teacher-led explanations of the concept first and used an interactive scientific visualisation second, while others worked with the…

This article draws its data from a collaborative intervention project "Expanding Textual Repertoires," which sought to help English teachers develop their students' higher-order work with language and texts in Singapore secondary schools. The focus is on the strategy of weaving, a form of connection-making which involves the deliberate…

This article presents what is possibly the first English translation of a 1930 manuscript related to Vygotsky's work (probably written by Vygotsky himself). This manuscript, the Zalkind Summary, is a five-point summary of his presentation to the First All-Union Congress on the Study of Human Behaviour in Leningrad in January 1930. This article…

Conceptual knowledge of our world is represented in semantic memory in terms of concepts and semantic relations between concepts. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the cortical regions underlying the processing of sequential and taxonomic relations. Participants were presented verbal cues and performed three tasks:…

The learning cycle is a way to structure inquiry in school science and occurs in several sequential phases. A learning cycle moves children through a scientific investigation by having them first explore materials, then construct a concept, and finally apply or extend the concept to other situations. Why the learning cycle? Because it is a…

The premise underlying this article is that identifying and using the "five practices model" can make discussions of cognitively challenging tasks more manageable for teachers. By giving teachers a roadmap that they can follow before and during whole-class discussions, these practices have the potential for helping teachers more effectively…

A tri-level structure of cognitive operations in concept learning is proposed, based on results of controlled experimentation and factor analytic studies. Global strategies in concept attainment are hypothesized to consist of three phases: attending to the situation, searching for information, and processing and using the information. Further,…

The instructional design presented in this article discusses a procedure for arranging and sequencing examples and nonexamples for concept teaching in the classroom. Concepts are divided into two types: definition and observation. A definition concept is one in which the critical attributes are determined by the definition, e.g., war. Observation…

The effects of 2 different types of positive and negative instances in learning "non-dimensioned" concepts were investigated. "Non-dimensioned" concepts are defined only by the presence or absence of distinct attributes. One-hundred-seventy-one 8th graders were given series of all positive or alternating positive and negative instances. Series of…

Several ways of structuring the early trials of a complex concept formation task were compared. Training trials were divided into two segments: (1) an asynchronous segment with one relevant and one irrelevant cue held constant while one relevant and one irrelevant cue varied and (2) a synchronous segment with all cues free to vary. The…

A sequential training procedure combining operant and cumulative learning hierarchy principles was found effective in reducing the decrement in concept identification performance typically observed in older adults. (JMB)

Previous research has shown that sequences in which instances from the same category appear successively facilitate performance in concept attainment. This could be due to subjects adopting strategies which involve comparisons of instances from within the same category. However, if subjects were to adopt a strategy involving comparisons of…

The study compared two methods of teaching an initial place value skill: a concrete, semiconcrete, abstract teaching sequence and an abstract-only presentation. Learning-disabled elementary and middle school students (N=24) using the concrete to abstract teaching sequence performed significantly better on three posttests than students taught the…