Education Commons^™

Improving Reading With Targeted Strategies For A Reluctant Elementary Reader, Amanda C. Bright

Amanda C. Bright

Cognitive Apprenticeships: An Instructional Design Review, Brent Wilson, Peggy Cole

Brent Wilson

This discussion of the relationship between two related disciplines--cognitive psychology and instructional design (ID)--characterizes instructional design as a more applied discipline, which concerns itself more with prescriptions and models for designing instruction, while instructional psychologists conduct empirical research on learning and instructional processes. It is posited that a problem-solving orientation to education is needed if schoo]s are to achieve substantial learning outcomes, and the concept of cognitive apprenticeships, which emphasize returning instruction to settings where worthwhile problems can be worked with and solved, is proposed as a possible solution to this problem. A brief review of ID models focuses on …

An Integrated Study Of Children's Construction Of Improper Fractions And The Teacher's Role In Promoting That Learning, Ron Tzur

Ron Tzur

In this constructivist teaching experiment with 2 fourth graders I studied the coemergence of teaching and children's construction of a specific conception that supports the generation of improper fractions. The children's posing and solving tasks in a computer microworld promoted a modification in their fraction schemes. They advanced from thinking about a unit fraction as a part of a whole to thinking about it as standing in a multiplicative relationship with a reference whole (the iterative fraction scheme). In this article I report an intertwined analysis of the children's construction of this multiplicative relationship and an examination of the teacher's …

Trends In Didactic Children's Literature From The Twentieth Century To The Present As Influenced By Secular Educational Philosophy, Carolyn Wicks

Carolyn J. Wicks

The purpose of this analysis was to identify trends in didactic children’s literature from the twentieth century to the present as influenced by secular educational philosophy. Using popularity and content research, ten books were sought from each decade beginning in the twentieth century and concluding with the beginning of the twenty-first century. These books were studied to determine what popular books didactically infer about society, culture, religion, gender, family, ecology, and controversial issues such as divorce, prejudice, violence, and physical intimacy. Using trend analysis of a homogeneous sampling of realistic American fiction, written in prose, for elementary readers in kindergarten …

Scientific And Engineering Practices (Seps) In The Next Generation Science Standards: Rubrics For Grades 3-5, Tayla M. Fulcher, Ana K. Houseal

Ana K Houseal

It has been nearly twenty years since the last national science standards, the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) Benchmarks for Science Literacy (Benchmarks) (AAAS, 1993) and the National Resource Council’s National Science Education Standards (NSES) (NRC, 1996) were published. In 2013, the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), developed using the latest research in science and science teaching, were released. Unlike previous standards, the NGSS are divided into three dimensions, (a) disciplinary core ideas (DCIs), which is the content, (b) crosscutting concepts (CCCs), which are the connections between science subjects, and (c) scientific and engineering practices (SEPs), the …

Improvization And Strategic Risk Taking In Informal Learning With Digital Media Literacy, Renee Hobbs

Renee Hobbs

The city provides a rich array of learning opportunities for young children. However, in many urban schools, often it can be logistically difficult to get young children out of the building. But when elementary children are encouraged to view the city as a classroom and use digital media to explore and represent their neighborhoods, they can be inspired by the unpredictable events of daily life to ask naive, critical and sometimes troubling questions. This paper presents a case study of a teacher in an informal media literacy learning environment who worked with a group of 9-year-olds in Philadelphia. It documents …

Students' Learning Style Preferences And Teachers' Instructional Strategies: Correlations Between Matched Styles And Academic Achievement, Mary L. Wilson

Mary Wilson

The purpose of the current study was to identify the extent to which learning styles influence the educational process as well as the outcome of students, particularly elementary-age students, in terms of academic achievement. This study examined the potential relationship between the degree of match (as determined by comparing learning style preferences of students with instructional strategies of teachers) and the academic achievement of fourth grade students as shown by Palmetto Assessment of State Standards scores in four academic content areas, namely English language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. The researcher collected data from a sample of approximately 200 …