Describes research within physical science courses for preservice elementary teachers, where groups of students had access to computers, examining how computers were used as representational tools to support meaning-making conversations within groups. Notes how special computer simulators facilitated student groups' construction of robust…

Discusses the impact of computer technology on education, highlighting concept maps, electronic learning logs, and computer simulations, which provide students deeper understanding of chemistry and research methods while doing real science and help teachers conduct ongoing formative assessment of class progress. Computer simulations help teachers…

Nurturing reflective teaching and improving critical-thinking instruction are two important goals in teacher education, but these are only achievable when teachers-in-training are provided with opportunities for building professional knowledge and for exhibiting reflective teaching practices. A computer simulation program (CS-TGCTS) was therefore…

The increased availability of computational modeling software has created opportunities for students to engage in scientific inquiry through constructing computer-based models of scientific phenomena. However, despite the growing trend of integrating technology into science curricula, educators need to understand what aspects of these technologies…

One principle of applied research is to design intervention programs targeted to teach useful skills to the participants (Baer, Wolf, & Risley, 1968), while structuring the program to promote generalization of the skills to the natural environment (Stokes & Baer, 1977). Proficiency in community skills (e.g., community navigation and…

Analysis of variance (ANOVA), a technique included in many introductory statistics courses, analyzes the relationship between a quantitative dependent variable and one or more independent qualitative variables. The nature of the relationship is expressed in a model with unknown parameters. Many textbooks emphasize the mechanics of the technique…

Present engineering has to deal with increasingly complex systems. In particular, this is the case in electrical engineering. Though this is obvious in microelectronics, also in the field of power systems engineers have to design, operate and maintain highly complex systems such as power grids, energy converters and electrical drives. This is…

There is little debate among researchers, policymakers, and educational stakeholders that reading achievement among African American students is an important issue (Strickland, 1994). While several scholars have contributed greatly to the research literature on matters pertaining to African American students and reading, additional research is…

Hypermedia is not a single technology; it is an integrated electronic environment that combines text, audio, and video into one large file. Users can explore information about a subject using several technologies at the same time. Although the technical foundation for hypermedia was established in the early 1970s, it was not until the late 1980s…

The purpose of this notebook is to assist educators who are designing and implementing inservice education programs to facilitate the effective use of computer integrated instruction (CII) in schools. It is divided into the following five sections: (1) Effective Inservice (a brief summary of inservice literature focused on inservice dimensions and…

Reports on a process which allows active study of mutating the characteristics of a population of organisms. States that the program, written in C, should run on a MS/DOS system with 640K; CGA is required for graphics output. Describes implementation procedures and two examples using the program. (RT)

Research on intelligent tutoring systems is discussed from the point of view of providing moment-by-moment adaptation of content and form of instruction to the changing cognitive needs of individual learners. Implications of this goal for cognitive diagnosis, subject matter analysis, teaching tactics, and teaching strategies are analyzed. (Author)

Describes RESTSIM, an interactive computer simulation program for graduate and upper-level undergraduate management, marketing, and retailing courses, which introduces naive users to simulation as a decision support technique, and provides a vehicle for studying various statistical procedures for evaluating simulation output. (MBR)

Will video games change the way we learn? We argue here for a particular view of games--and of learning--as activities that are most powerful when they are personally meaningful, experiential, social, and epistemological all at the same time. From this perspective, we describe an approach to the design of learning environments that builds on the…

When developing curriculum materials for new contexts, designers feed forward work from similar projects. This customization process must attend to various influences to determine how features from previous efforts will be emphasized and combined. This paper discusses resources and ideas that influenced the design of the RiverWeb Water Quality…