Introduction to the Special Issue on Component Computing in Education

The use of professional software is an integral part of a student's education in the mining engineering curriculum at The Pennsylvania State University. Even though mining engineering represents a limited market across U.S. educational institutions, the goal still exists for using this type of software to enrich the learning environment with visual elements and, therefore, enhance the students' ability to understand design principles in a more systematic manner. All of the students are required to develop a complete mine-design project, from conception to completion, which includes the selection of appropriate mining components and systems to meet desired needs. However, the question that is often asked is whether or not the desired benefits from using such software can be justified in terms of initial cost, and programming time required for both the instructor and students of small engineering programs, such as mining engineering. The objective of this paper is to evaluate the experiences of faculty and students with typical professional software tools available for mining-engineering educational programs, and to assess their ability to enhance active teaching and learning through computer-based problem solving in a manner which is cost effective for a small-enrolment engineering major.     

Introduction to the Special Issue: Unpacking Quality in Early Childhood Programs

Life in culture is, then, an interplay between the versions of the world that people form under its institutional sway and the version of it that are products of their individual histories. It rarely conforms to anything resembling a cookbook of recipes or formulas, for it is a universal of all cultures that they contain factional or institutional interests. Nonetheless, any particular individual's idiosyncratic interpretations of the world are constantly subject to judgment against what are taken to be the canonical beliefs of the culture at large. Such communal judgments, though often governed by "rational" and evidentiary criteria, are just as often dominated by commitments, tastes, interests, and expressions of adherence to the culture's values relating to the good life, decency, legitimacy, or power. (Bruner, 1996, p. 14)     

Introduction to the Special Issue

Expository text is often neglected in the elementary school curriculum even though most of the reading that children do in school is of that type. Most of the research that demonstrates the importance of text structure in reading comprehension and the benefits that accrue from instruction in text structure deals with children at or above the 4th grade. This research literature, reviewed briefly, provides the basis for the work that is described in this article, which involves younger children. First, a study is presented that demonstrates that children are sensitive to text structure, and therefore would benefit from instruction, as early as 2nd grade. Second, a new instructional program is described that focuses intensively on one specific expository structure, compare and contrast. Finally, the results of a study that evaluates the effects of the program are described.