This book puts the structure and function of knowledge firmly in the driving seat of university curriculum development and teaching practice. Through the application of concept mapping, the structure of knowledge can be visualised to offer an explicit perspective on key issues such as curriculum design, student learning and assessment feedback. Structural visualisation allows a greater scrutiny of the qualitative characteristics of knowledge so that we can analyse students’ patterns of learning and match them to expert practice. Based on nearly two decades of research and direct observations of university teaching by the author, this book aims to offer a scholarly account of teacher development. It focusses on elements that will be of immediate utility to academics who want to develop their teaching to a level of adaptive experts, offering them greater autonomy in their role and a powerful understanding of teaching to escape the repressive routines of the traditional classroom. Rather than providing a comprehensive review of educational research, this book provides a route through selected theories that can be explored in practice by university teachers on their own or in groups. The book will help academics to identify the nature of powerful knowledge within their disciplines and consider ways that this may be used by students to become active and engaged learners through the manipulation and transformation of knowledge, and so become expert students.

First Published in 1986. This book marks a watershed in cognitive science activity at Yale University. Over the past decade, the cognitive science orientation has become more and more integrated into the mainstream of cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence workers now feel comfortable thinking about psychological experimentation. This book collects in one place the research work which concentrates on covering topics in the representation, processing, and recall of meaningful verbal .materials. Several of the chapters are first reports of research; others are specially prepared reviews and elaborations of research reported previously. Here it is all together: Studies of scripts, plans, and higher-level knowledge structures; analyses of knowledge structure activation, of autobiographical memory, of the phenomenon of reminding, of the summarization of text, of explanations for events, and more.

This book takes a fresh look at programs for advanced studies for high school students in the United States, with a particular focus on the Advanced Placement and the International Baccalaureate programs, and asks how advanced studies can be significantly improved in general. It also examines two of the core issues surrounding these programs: they can have a profound impact on other components of the education system and participation in the programs has become key to admission at selective institutions of higher education. By looking at what could enhance the quality of high school advanced study programs as well as what precedes and comes after these programs, this report provides teachers, parents, curriculum developers, administrators, college science and mathematics faculty, and the educational research community with a detailed assessment that can be used to guide change within advanced study programs.

The National Science Foundation funded a synthesis study on the status, contributions, and future direction of discipline-based education research (DBER) in physics, biological sciences, geosciences, and chemistry. DBER combines knowledge of teaching and learning with deep knowledge of discipline-specific science content. It describes the discipline-specific difficulties learners face and the specialized intellectual and instructional resources that can facilitate student understanding. Discipline-Based Education Research is based on a 30-month study built on two workshops held in 2008 to explore evidence on promising practices in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. This book asks questions that are essential to advancing DBER and broadening its impact on undergraduate science teaching and learning. The book provides empirical research on undergraduate teaching and learning in the sciences, explores the extent to which this research currently influences undergraduate instruction, and identifies the intellectual and material resources required to further develop DBER. Discipline-Based Education Research provides guidance for future DBER research. In addition, the findings and recommendations of this report may invite, if not assist, post-secondary institutions to increase interest and research activity in DBER and improve its quality and usefulness across all natural science disciples, as well as guide instruction and assessment across natural science courses to improve student learning. The book brings greater focus to issues of student attrition in the natural sciences that are related to the quality of instruction. Discipline-Based Education Research will be of interest to educators, policy makers, researchers, scholars, decision makers in universities, government agencies, curriculum developers, research sponsors, and education advocacy groups.

How do we understand numbers? Do animals and babies have numerical abilities? Why do some people fail to grasp numbers, and how we can improve numerical understanding? Numbers are vital to so many areas of life: in science, economics, sports, education, and many aspects of everyday life from infancy onwards. Numerical cognition is a vibrant area that brings together scientists from different and diverse research areas (e.g., neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, anthropology, education, and neuroscience) using different methodological approaches (e.g., behavioral studies of healthy children and adults and of patients; electrophysiology and brain imaging studies in humans; single-cell neurophysiology in non-human primates, habituation studies in human infants and animals, and computer modeling). While the study of numerical cognition had been relatively neglected for a long time, during the last decade there has been an explosion of studies and new findings. This has resulted in an enormous advance in our understanding of the neural and cognitive mechanisms of numerical cognition. In addition, there has recently been increasing interest and concern about pupils' mathematical achievement in many countries, resulting in attempts to use research to guide mathematics instruction in schools, and to develop interventions for children with mathematical difficulties. This handbook brings together the different research areas that make up the field of numerical cognition in one comprehensive and authoritative volume. The chapters provide a broad and extensive review that is written in an accessible form for scholars and students, as well as educationalists, clinicians, and policy makers. The book covers the most important aspects of research on numerical cognition from the areas of development psychology, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and rehabilitation, learning disabilities, human and animal cognition and neuroscience, computational modeling, education and individual differences, and philosophy. Containing more than 60 chapters by leading specialists in their fields, the Oxford Handbook of Numerical Cognition is a state-of-the-art review of the current literature.

The ability to communicate through spoken and written language is one of the defining characteristics of the human race, yet it remains a deeply mysterious process. The young science of psycholinguistics attempts to uncover the mechanisms and representations underlying human language. This interdisciplinary field has seen massive developments over the past decade, with a broad expansion of the research base, and the incorporation of new experimental techniques such as brain imaging and computational modelling. The result is that real progress is being made in the understanding of the key components of language in the mind. The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics brings together the views of 75 leading researchers in psycholinguistics to provide a comprehensive and authoritative review of the current state of the art in psycholinguistics. With almost 50 chapters written by experts in the field, the range and depth of coverage is unequalled. The contributors are eminent in a wide range of fields, including psychology, linguistics, human memory, cognitive neuroscience, bilingualism, genetics, development and neuropsychology. Their contributions are organised into six themed sections, covering word recognition, the mental lexicon, comprehension and discourse, language production, language development, and perspectives on psycholinguistics. The breadth of coverage, coupled with the accessibility of the short chapter format should make the handbook essential reading for both students and researchers in the fields of psychology, linguistics and neuroscience.

This book introduces the concept of a hypothetical type of knowledge construction -- referred to as structural knowledge -- that goes beyond traditional forms of information recall to provide the bases for knowledge application. Assuming that the validity of the concept is accepted, the volume functions as a handbook for supporting the assessment and use of structural knowledge in learning and instructional settings. It's descriptions are direct and short, and its structure is consistent. Almost all of the chapters describe a technique for representing and assessing structural knowledge acquisition, conveying knowledge structures through direct instruction, or providing learners with strategies that they may use to acquire structural knowledge. These chapters include the following sections in the same sequence: * description of the technique and its theoretical or conceptual rationale * examples and applications * procedures for development and use * effectiveness -- learner interactions and differences, and advantages and disadvantages * references to the literature. The chapters are structured to facilitate access to information as well as to illuminate comparisons and contrasts among the techniques.

We are pleased to bring you this collection of papers for the Ninth International Conference on Conceptual Structures (ICCS), representing continued excellence in conceptual structures research. We have adopted the title \Broadening the Base," acknowledging the importance of contributions from scholars in many research areas. The rst ICCS meetings focused primarily on Sowa’s conceptual graphs; in recent years, however, the ICCS conference series has intentionally widened its scope to stimulate research across domain boundaries. We hope that this stimulation is further enhanced by ICCS 2001 continuing the long tradition of lively conferences about Conceptual Structures. We wish to express our appreciation to all the authors of submitted papers, to the general chair, to the members of the editorial board and the program committee, and to the additional reviewers for making ICCS 2001 a valuable contribution to the knowledge processing research eld. We would also like to acknowledge the leadership of Guy Mineau and Bernhard Ganter in providing a solid framework for an open and e ective reviewing process. Very special thanks go to the local organizers for making the conference possible and, furthermore, an enjoyable and inspiring event. We are grateful to the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the University of Karlsruhe for their generous support.