The teaching of Euclidean geometry is a matter of serious concern in South Africa. This research, therefore, examined the Euclidean geometry learning experiences of 16 Grade 11 students from four South African secondary schools. Data were obtained using focus group discussions and student diary records. Students who were taught using a Van Hiele…

Learners underperform in stoichiometry as they lack conceptual reasoning of the underlying concepts and the ability to solve stoichiometric problems. Therefore, it was necessary to determine if there is a statistical correlation between problem-solving skills and conceptual reasoning in stoichiometry and if so, whether one can significantly…

The moderating effects of motivation, social control, and self-regulation in predicting academic achievement were examined in Grades 11-12 for 3,281 seventh through nine graders. Standardized assessments of college readiness and student self-reported measures of psychosocial factors were used in the study. The results showed that females in Grades…

The main objective of this study was to investigate theories and practices of writing. To achieve this objective, qualitative data were collected using qualitative content (document) analysis, observation, and interview. The participants of the study were selected from North Shoa Zone Preparatory Schools. Five sections for observation and ten…

Both cognitive and sociocultural traditions have customarily theorised learning in terms of processes of progression within single communities. More recently, educational scholars have started to focus on learning as a horizontal process of boundary crossing between multiple communities. A problem of this approach is that boundaries are often laid…

On the writing component of the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, 12th grade high school students' scores on argumentative tasks were lower than on tasks that required them to explain or to convey an experience ("National Assessment of Educational Progress," 2011). Similarly, 11th and 12th graders at the research…

In this paper we report on the process of argument construction in whole class discussions and how this was used by participants as a tool for joint meaning-making. The study draws on Vygotsky's view of learning as the active construction of knowledge and on theories of argumentation. Most previous research in South African science classrooms has…

Investigates the differential effects of ownership opportunities and instructional support on the writing-task engagement of high school students reporting low-, mid-, and high-levels of writing self-efficacy. (RAE)

Self-regulation refers to the degree that individuals become metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active in their own learning processes. One potentially helpful means of examining students' self-regulation is to analyze their internal representations, or scripts, for recurring academic tasks. For this study, researchers analyzed the…

By restructuring the sequence in which American history is taught so that classes proceed from the present to the past, secondary students in the Backward History Project have learned history more effectively and have been more interested and involved than in standard classes. The philosophy underlying this change is discussed. (IS)

A sentence completion task was used to investigate age differences in childrens' ability or inclination to invoke premises and inferences during prose processing, tasks which (according to the constructive hypothesis) adults typically perform. A pilot study confirmed that the sentence completion task was preferable to the recognition paradigm,…

This study focused on the transition in memory between conceptual knowledge formation and procedural knowledge development. The first variable--display time interval--controlled the amount of instructional display time of each interrogatory example; the second variable--content sequence--sequenced examples according to response-sensitive decision…

Defines the Scaffolding Reading Experience as a reading improvement technique that incorporates prereading, reading, and postreading activities. Discusses how this can be used in social studies classes and provides specific examples from an 11th-grade U.S. history class. Includes a list of optional activities and teaching suggestions. (MJP)

This paper reports a six month intervention program in two ninth grade science classes and one eleventh grade human biology class. One teacher, one researcher, and 64 students participated in this action research to improve student learning and attitude through training in metacognition. The researcher was a participant observer, who introduced…