A Design-based Approach to Fostering Understanding of Global Climate Change

To prepare students to make informed decisions and gain coherent understanding about global climate change, we tested and refined a middle school inquiry unit that featured interactive visualizations. Based on evidence from student pre-test responses, we increased emphasis on energy transfer and transformation. The first iteration improved comprehension of the visualizations resulting in better understanding of energy transfer (n?=?67). The second iteration improved understanding of energy transformation (n?=?109) by adding pivotal cases, reducing deceptive clarity, and emphasizing distinguishing of ideas. Focusing student investigations in the second version allowed students to make more normative, personally relevant decisions related to their energy use. These iterative refinements reflected knowledge integration principles and offer guidance for designers of inquiry units.     

Measuring Knowledge Integration Learning of Energy Topics: A two-year longitudinal study

Although researchers call for inquiry learning in science, science assessments rarely capture the impact of inquiry instruction. This paper reports on the development and validation of assessments designed to measure middle-school students’ progress in gaining integrated understanding of energy while studying an inquiry-oriented curriculum. The assessment development was guided by the knowledge integration framework. Over 2 years of implementation, more than 4,000 students from 4 schools participated in the study, including a cross-sectional and a longitudinal cohort. Results from item response modeling analyses revealed that: (a) the assessments demonstrated satisfactory psychometric properties in terms of reliability and validity; (b) both the cross-sectional and longitudinal cohorts made progress on integrating their understanding energy concepts; and (c) among many factors (e.g. gender, grade, school, and home language) associated with students’ science performance, unit implementation was the strongest predictor.     

Attitudes of Elementary Classroom Teachers Toward Mainstreaming

The purpose of this study was to investigate attitudes toward mainstreaming issues of elementary classroom teachers undertaking an introductory course in special education. Subjects were also queried about how they felt P.L. 94‐142 was perceived by other interested groups and indicated their estimates of the manageability of students with special needs within the regular classroom. Findings support the need for comprehensive in‐service training programs designed to modify attitudes of regular teachers.     

Project high hopes summer institute: Curriculum for developing talent in students with special needs

This article examines a summer institute curriculum that was developed for and used with handicapped students who were identified as gifted in the area(s) of visual arts, performing arts, engineering, or life sciences. The students and the summer institute were part of a federally funded Javits program, Project High Hopes. The curriculum was real world, multi‐disciplinary and problem based in that it used a decaying water feature on the school grounds as its focus. Using a creative problem solving process, students identified problems with the water feature, developed solutions, created presentations, and presented their solutions to the school board. Student products are described as are conclusions, results and possible implications for other educational settings.     

Cognitive Arithmetic Differences in Learning Difficulty Groups and the Role of Behavioral Inattention

The objectives of this study were to (1) evaluate group differences in specific arithmetic competencies among students with various types of learning difficulties (LD) and (2) to examine the influence of attention behaviors on possible group differences. Participants were a community sample of 291 third‐ and fourth‐grade students with reading difficulties (RD) and/or math difficulties (MD), or with no LD (51 MD, 66 RD, 89 MD + RD, and 85 No LD students). Students were administered computerized measures of cognitive addition, subtraction, and estimation (accuracy and response times), as well as other measures. Groups were compared with and without covariation for behavioral inattention and their interactions. Small sums addition, thought to reflect retrieval processes, estimation accuracy, and number knowledge, did not show differences between MD and MD + RD students, although both showed lower performance than the RD and No LD groups. Attention behavior had a variable impact, most typically making group differences larger, but did not alter the general pattern of group differences, except in the case of estimation.