Lab work is the unique feature of a science education. Most of the physical and biological sciences are essentially empirical - research is conducted, knowledge is produced and progress is made in the professional laboratories of scientists. It has seemed logical that student science should reflect professional science and thus ...

American children's freewheeling play once took place in rural fields and city streets, using equipment largely of their own making. Today, play is increasingly confined to backyards, basements, playrooms and bedrooms, and derives much of its content from video games, television dramas and Saturday morning cartoons. Modern children spend an ...

The average 18-year-old in the USA has already watched about eighteen thousand hours of television. This exposure (more than the total time spent in school) must be of enormous influence on morals, on emotions, on the imagination, on breadth and depth of knowledge, on aesthetic judgement, and on language. Tracing ...

Philip, a fourth former in a Wellington high school, was not very keen on writing. He thought little of his own writing ability, tended to write very slowly and was of the view that his difficulties with spelling prevented him from writing down good ideas. For Philip, writing was indeed ...

During 1979-80 we were invited to work in three middle schools (with 8- to 13-year-olds) to clarify what counts as progress in writing. We decided to select, with the teachers, three or four children from each year group. Each child was chosen as a typical representative of a fairly large ...

One of the disturbing things about 'common sense' is that just about every situation has a bit of folklore to back it up. On the subject of internal assessment you can choose between 'learning from history' or 'history is bound to repeat itself',
select your evidence accordingly, and 'prove' your ...

Hamilton Teachers College. involved in extending the qualifications courses it offers. conducted a survey to find out what qualifications teachers actually aspired to. which subjects they wanted to learn. and whether they preferred to do it in the classroom or by correspondence. A written questionnaire was sent to all 1440 ...

Blocks are blocks - the units of wood found in every good pre-school. They fit together in exact multiples; they are fun to play with but they also introduce without fuss and direct teaching mathematical concepts such as addition and subtraction, and spatial concepts such as area, volume and balance ...

Aggressive and unmanageable children pose one of the more difficult of the problems faced by the classroom teacher. Overseas research suggests that there are two factors which more than anything else predict the development of behaviour problems in children. These factors are (a) high levels of discord between parents, and ...

Once a day I try to state in short words what I think. The words I use are words of one pulse. The rest of the day I use words that are two~, three~, or six-pulse words ~ just the way school folks ought to talk. But each day for ...