Bumble Boosters: Students Doing Real Science

Bumble Boosters was a lottery grant funded cooperative project between the University of Nebraska – Lincoln Department of Entomology, the Lincoln Public Schools Science Focus Program, and the Lincoln Folsom Children's Zoo. The primary education goal of the project was to create a community of learners to conduct authentic research on bumble bees in Nebraska. Participants were actively engaged in collecting bumble bees and placing nesting domiciles. Internet technology was employed to facilitate networking between project participants. Systematic evaluation was conducted during and after the project.     

Working Memory, Motivation, and Teacher-Initiated Learning

Working memory is where we “think” as we learn. A notion that emerges as a synthesis from several threads in the research literatures of cognition, motivation, and connectionism is that motivation in learning is the process whereby working memory resource allocation is instigated and sustained. This paper reviews much literature on motivation and working memory, and concludes that the apparent novelty of the proposal offered to describe motivation in terms of working memory results from the apparent lack of cross-channel exchange among these research traditions. The relation between working memory and motivation is explored in the context of the interactive compensatory model of learning (ICML) in which learning is considered to result from the interaction of ability, motivation, and prior learning. The ICML is recast in light of the revised definition of motivation offered here. This paper goes on to suggest ways in which a range of teaching and learning issues and activities may be reconceptualized in the context of a model emphasizing a learner's working memory that makes use of chunks of previously acquired knowledge.     

Extraordinary Animals and Expository Writing: Zoo in the Classroom

A zoo outreach program led to placing animals in classrooms where those animals became foci for numerous learning activities such as writing, observing, and care. Systematic debriefings suggested uniqueness to learning outcomes connected to zoo animals. Subsequent analysis of student writing indicated that students responded to situational interest by recording more observations, made use of more science facts, and used more science vocabulary when writing about unique animals (albino hedgehog, legless lizard) than ‘ordinary’ animals (rabbit, dove). The results are interpreted in terms of motivation, creating situational interest, and the familiarity of the schema available to the students. Policy implications are discussed.     

自我调控学习的课堂教学设计理论

培养学生掌握自我调控学习的技能就是教给学生在未来社会生存的本领。本介绍了如何在课堂进行学科内容教学的同时进行自我调控学习策略的教学，并提出了一个在课堂教学环境下同时提高老师自我调控学习技能的新型教师专业学习模式：     

说课案例

课题受迫振动共振(见高一物理新教材第九章第七节P175～178) 本案例由两部分构成:说课稿;与说课配套的教案.     

Further evidence that conditioned inhibition is not the mechanism of an extinction cue’s effect: A reinforced cue prevents spontaneous recovery

Previous research has demonstrated that discrete cues presented during extinction of a conditioned response (extinction cues) subsequently reduce spontaneous recovery and the renewal effect. In order to assess whether an extinction cue’s effect is due to conditioned inhibition, the effect of pairing an extinction cue with food on the cue’s capacity to modulate spontaneous recovery was investigated in an appetitive conditioning experiment with rats. Conditioned inhibitors paired with the unconditioned stimulus lose their potential to inhibit responding. The food-paired extinction cue did not lose its potential to reduce spontaneous recovery. In fact, it reduced spontaneous recovery more than did an extinction cue that was not paired with food. The results indicate that extinction cues attenuate postextinction recovery of conditioned responding through a mechanism other than conditioned inhibition. The cue’s action appears to be similar to that of serial negative occasion setters. Theories of spontaneous recovery and the relationship of extinction cues to other modulatory stimuli are discussed.     

The perceptions,policy, and practice of educating twins: A review

Twin births are increasing at a rapid rate, yet many educational personnel throughout the world are unaware of the needs of twins in school. Stereotypical views of twins as pathologically close or excessively dependent pervade educational policies and practices, despite the fact that twins do not differ from singletons on rates of psychological disturbance. Research shows that many schools implement strict policies for classroom placement of twins, yet the effects of such policies on twins' development and educational attainment are currently unknown. Recommendations for school personnel and future directions for this formative area are discussed. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Psychol Schs 40: 429–438, 2003.     

An Internet-Based Course: Leadership Issues

It comes as no surprise that persons in leadership roles face many decisions related to providing distance learning experiences, especially ones centered on the Internet. In this paper we will try to focus upon leadership issues that arose during the creation and offering of an Internet-based course for high school chemistry teachers. One of us served as the department chair, another as the professor of record and course designer, and the third as a researcher who developed a systematic case study of the course.