Supporting Inquiry Processes with an Interactive Learning Environment: Inquiry Island

This research addresses the effectiveness of an interactive learning environment, Inquiry Island, as a general-purpose framework for the design of inquiry-based science curricula. We introduce the software as a scaffold designed to support the creation and assessment of inquiry projects, and describe its use in a middle-school genetics unit. Students in the intervention showed significant gains in inquiry skills. We also illustrate the power of the software to gather and analyze qualitative data about student learning.     

Political Education in the Early Years: The place of civic virtues

Citizenship education needs to start from the values and associated institutional practices and civic virtues of liberal democracy. Citizens need political knowledge and skills but they also need to be certain sorts of people, to exercise civic virtues. The view that civic virtues are unnecessary in a democracy is considered and rejected, as is the view that civic education should not begin in the first school. It is argued that the fostering of civic virtues can and should begin in the first school, primarily through its organisation and ethos. For it to do so, however, attention needs to be devoted to it in teacher education.     

Examining Scientific Vocabulary: Mapping Controlled Vocabularies with Free Text Keywords

Scientific repositories create a new environment for studying traditional information science issues. The interaction between indexing terms provided by users and controlled vocabularies continues to be an area of debate and study. This article reports and analyzes findings from a study that mapped the relationships between free text keywords and controlled vocabulary terms used in the sciences. Based on this study's findings recommendations are made about which vocabularies may be better to use in scientific data repositories.     

Finding ‘my kind of teaching’: How a drama project became a teacher’s expressive teaching moment

This case study examines how a teacher defined ‘my kind of teaching’. We focus on a dramatic production of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and frame the teacher’s discussion with Dewey’s significant moments of experience. Findings indicate the teacher shifted her role to a facilitator position, learned alongside her students, and connected her past experiences with acting. Implications point to expressive teaching moments as experiences in which teachers might extend state‐mandated curricula, connect with their personal lives, and find delight in teaching.