At an age marked by the emergence of new literacies, vast technological developments, and social networking practices, language is currently approached from a pragmatic perspective that recognises its functional use to meet realistic communicative goals. Taking this into account, the present study sought to identify the functional writing skills…

This article analyses the construct validity of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme's Theory of Knowledge course in the light of claims that it is a course in critical thinking. After discussion around critical thinking--what it is and why it is valuable educationally--the article analyses the extent to which the course aims,…

Changes in American education require that teachers are evaluated more often, and expectations increasingly include teaching to develop critical thinking skills. This article uses Bloom's taxonomy in describing ways physical educators can include critical thinking in their lessons, both to enhance their teaching and to meet expectations of…

In this article we discuss the findings of our research on students' understanding of vector concepts in problems without physical context. First, we develop a complete taxonomy of the most frequent errors made by university students when learning vector concepts. This study is based on the results of several test administrations of…

Many science education researchers have argued that learners' commitment to a substance (matter-based) ontology impedes the learning of scientific concepts that scientists typically conceptualize as processes or interactions, such as force, electric current, and heat. By this account, students' tendency to classify these entities as…

This study examined teachers' use of the Multiple Intelligences Theory on vocabulary acquisition by preschoolers during English as a second language (ESL) classes in a K-12 school in Lebanon. Eighty kindergartners (KG II, aged 5 years) and eight teachers constituted the sample. The study used mixed methods, including observations of…

Despite the importance of the non-task interactions in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environments as emphasized in the literature, few studies have investigated online behavior of people in the CSCL environments. This paper studies the pattern of non-task interactions among postgraduate students in an Australian university. The…

Comparative and international education has been both a particularly generative area for the exploration of themes in relation to gender and education, but has also tended to impose limits regarding how gender and education are understood. In reflecting critically on the history of my own work in this field, and some of the early scholarship of…

Twenty-four pre-service teachers participated in a workshop designed to provide explicit opportunities to learn what spatial thinking is and how to incorporate it into teaching practice. The objectives of this paper are to: (1) examine the educational effect of the workshop on pre-service teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and (2)…

Science is an important domain for investigating students' responses to information that contradicts their prior knowledge. In previous studies of this topic, this information was communicated verbally. The present research used diagrams, specifically trees (cladograms) depicting evolutionary relationships among taxa. Effects of college…

Many classrooms are comprised of students with differing abilities ranging from students with disabilities to students with gifts and talents. While these students are sharing the same space, their differing cognitive levels must be met. Therefore, curricula must be used to meet the needs of the cognitive level that is represented within the…

How do children resolve the problem of indeterminacy when learning a new word? By one account, children adopt a "taxonomic assumption" and expect the word to denote only members of a particular taxonomic category. According to one version of this constraint, young children should represent polysemous words that label multiple kinds--for…

The editing and revision stages are an important part of the writing process. This study documented the types of revisions, revision units, and revision methods used during writing conferences with hearing-impaired students. The study included seventeen hearing-impaired students educated with the auditory/oral approach and enrolled in grades six…

We present results from a study that categorizes and assesses the quality of questions and explanations authored by students in question repositories produced as part of the summative assessment in introductory physics courses over two academic sessions. Mapping question quality onto the levels in the cognitive domain of Bloom's taxonomy, we…

The Task Model is a description of each task in a workflow. It defines attributes associated with that task. The creation of task models becomes increasingly important as the assessment tasks become more complex. Explicitly delineating the impact of task variables on the ability to collect evidence and make inferences demands thoughtfulness from…