Educators must consider how learning environments can structure experiences to produce desired learning outcomes. In this paper, the author describes one type of learning environment where youth have the opportunity to construct adaptive, emergent identities--a "dramaturgical" process that structures the telling, adapting, and performing of…

This paper explores the possibilities and challenges games and simulations pose for informal science education. The authors begin with a brief overview of the recent history of games and games research. They then attempt to clarify the distinctions between games and simulations. Next, they examine types of informal learning…

A case study of one low income African American child, Peter Horner, is used to explore how children accumulate various forms of writing capital. Peter's development was tracked over 10 years, from first grade through high school. The construct of time is explored by examining how capital contributes to the construction of "habitus" (Bourdieu,…

This qualitative case study reports on processes and outcomes of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded System-Wide Change for All Learners and Educators (SCALE) project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison). It addresses a critical challenge in studying systemic reform in complex organizations: the lack of methodologies that…

Researchers have disagreed about the extent to which differences in achievement based on socioeconomic status (SES) accumulate during the school year as compared to the summer, and the literature has not fully assessed the contributions of social contexts--in the form of both school and neighborhood poverty concentration and racial and ethnic…

This paper examines how middle school students developed understanding of transformational geometry through design activities in Escher's World, a computationally rich design experiment explicitly modeled on an architectural design studio. Escher's World was based on the theory of pedagogical praxis (Shaffer, 2004a), which suggests that preserving…

Successful curricula are not collections of isolated elements; rather, effective learning environments function as coherent systems (Brown & Campione, 1996; see also Papert, 1980; Shaffer, 1998). The theory of pedagogical praxis begins with the premise that computers and other information technologies make it easier for students to become active…