Science content area texts are difficult for most middle school students, particularly whose reading skills are below grade level. This article describes an innovative approach to integrating the teaching of middle school science content and reading skills to increase levels of student success with content area textbooks. For reading instruction,…

Using WebQuests for inquiry-based learning represents a higher-order use of technology requiring students to exercise information seeking, analyzing, and synthesizing strategies. This research was designed to obtain a better understanding of how to enhance the pedagogical effectiveness of WebQuests and of how students interact with the various…

A Mind Map is an outline in which the major categories radiate from a central image and lesser categories are portrayed as branches of larger branches. The author describes an in-class exercise in which small groups of students each create a Mind Map for a specific topic. This exercise is another example of an active and collaborative learning…

Examined the effectiveness of concept mapping on the science achievement of African American middle grades science students distributed into eight different classes by ability level. Results of this quasi, non-randomized, control-treatment group, pretest-posttest study found no significant overall effects of treatment on science achievement. There…

This study is intended to develop an assessment instrument to investigate students' understandings about internal transport in plants and human circulatory system. A refined process of a two-tier diagnostic test was used to develop the instrument. Finally, three versions of the Internal Transport in Plants and the Human Circulatory System test…

Previous research (e.g. "Cognition" 64 (1997) 73) suggests that the privileged level for inductive inference in a folk biological conceptual hierarchy does not correspond to the ''basic'' level (i.e. the level at which concepts are both informative and distinct). To further explore inductive inference within conceptual hierarchies, we examine…

Teaching science in middle school is both rewarding and demanding. Creating an exciting learning environment with a rich science curriculum that engages all students is challenging enough. Monitoring the progress of as many as 150 individual students and knowing that they understand the science concepts we are teaching can be overwhelming. How can…

The education of science teachers necessarily involves instruction around the use of computer technologies. Acadia University, a laptop institution, offers a unique setting where students are immersed in the critique of pedagogical applications of computers. The current trend to employ constructivist approaches in teaching provides a backdrop for…

In this conceptual article, the authors describe an alternative course structure that joins learning key marketing concepts to creative problem solving. The authors describe an approach using a convergent-divergent-convergent (CDC) process: key concepts are first derived from case material to be organized in a marketing matrix, which is then used…

We review the processes of goal identification employed in teacher planning. A new type of graphical organizer (Fact-Action-Schema-Transcript or FAST) is introduced and its applications to teacher planning discussed. We describe a pair of algorithms for (a) creating FASTs for undergraduate mathematics and (b) using FASTs to create sets of student…

What do the National Staff Development Council's standards look like in practice for teachers, principals, central office staff, superintendents, and board members? Newly developed Innovation Configurations help everyone on the list understand where they fall along the continuum of effective practices aligned to the standards.

The DNA triplet code also functions as a binary code. Because double-ring compounds cannot bind to double-ring compounds in the DNA code, the sequence of bases classified simply as purines or pyrimidines can encode for smaller groups of possible amino acids. This is an intuitive approach to teaching the DNA code. (Contains 6 figures.)

In 2005, the School of Property, Construction and Project Management at RMIT University, Melbourne, introduced a new curriculum format for all first year students. All students enrolling in one of the four undergraduate degrees offered by the school commenced a common first year programme. This new curriculum was adopted to provide students with a…

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between approaches to learning and locus of control of students from the USA, Japan, and Taiwan. The results show that students from the USA utilized more rote memory learning compared to students from Japan and Taiwan, while students from Japan were more likely to be "Achieving"…

This study aims at highlighting the collaborative activity of two high school students (age 14) in the cases of modeling the complex biological process of plant growth with two different tools: the "paper & pencil" concept mapping technique and the computer-supported educational environment "ModelsCreator". Students' shared activity in both cases…