In order to capture current educational practices in eLearning courses, more advanced `learning design' capabilities are needed than are provided by the open eLearning specifications hitherto available. Specifically, these fall short in terms of multi-role workflows, collaborative peer-interaction, personalization and support for learning services. We present a new specification that both extends and integrates current specifications to support the portable representation of units of learning (e.g. lessons, learning events) that have advanced learning designs. This is the Learning Design specification. It enables the creation of a complete, abstract and portable description of the pedagogical approach taken in a course, which can then be realized by a conforming system. It can model multi-role teaching-learning processes and supports personalization of learning routes. The underlying generic pedagogical modelling language has been translated into a specification (a standard developed and agreed upon by domain and industry experts) that was developed in the context of IMS, one of the major bodies involved in the development of interoperability specifications in the field of eLearning. The IMS Learning Design specification is discussed in this article in the context of its current status, its limitations and its future development.

There is a significant gap between theories of general psychological functions on one hand (e.g., memory) and theories of mathematical content knowledge on the other (e.g., content of algebra). To better guide the design of ground breaking and demonstrably better mathematics instruction, we need instructional principles and associated design methods to fill this gap in a way that is not only consistent with psychological and content theories but prompts and guides us beyond what those theories can do. Toward this goal, I reflect on lessons from past and current Cognitive Tutor mathematics projects. From this experience, I have abstracted four instructional bridging principles, Situation-Abstraction, Action-Generalization, Visual-Verbal, and Conceptual-Procedural, and associated methods for applying them. I illustrate these in the context of the design of the successful Cognitive Tutor Algebra course (now in more than 800 schools) and the on-going research and development of a Cognitive Tutor course for 6 th grade mathematics.

Intelligence, expertise, ability and talent, as these terms have traditionally been used in education and psychology, are socially agreed upon labels that minimize the dynamic, evolving, and contextual nature of individual–environment relations. These hypothesized constructs can instead be described as functional relations distributed across whole persons and particular contexts through which individuals appear knowledgeably skillful. The purpose of this article is to support a concept of ability and talent development that is theoretically grounded in 5 distinct, yet interrelated, notions: ecological psychology, situated cognition, distributed cognition, activity theory, and legitimate peripheral participation. Although talent may be reserved by some to describe individuals possessing exceptional ability and ability may be described as an internal trait, in our description neither ability nor talent are possessed. Instead, they are treated as equivalent terms that can be used to describe functional transactions that are situated across person-in-situation. Further, and more important, by arguing that ability is part of the individual–environment transaction, we take the potential to appear talented out of the hands (or heads) of the few and instead treat it as an opportunity that is available to all although it may be actualized more frequently by some.

this paper, we present a study that we conducted to explore the depth of this transfer and to investigate methods for reducing its occurrence in generation, where it is clearly inappropriate. Given the strength of the student desire to choose axes appropriate to a bar graph when generating scatterplots and histograms, we decided to investigate whether there were ways to induce these students to instead draw the correct axes, and if there was further mistransfer of bar graph knowledge once the students had the correct axes, as the effect in Lehrer et al suggests. Therefore, we chose the general intervention of drawing the students'attention to the variables, in order to attempt to express each of these factors. Figure 1: The student was asked to draw a histogram but chose variables more appropriate to a bar graph (a nominal X and continuous Y, instead of bins of a continuous variable on the X and frequency of each bin on the Y)

This paper studies the e-learning technologies from the standardization aspect with a glimpse on future changes. Our aim is to thoroughly review the existing standards, the e-Learning process workflow and the market needs and trends and indicate the best path for achieving a global standard for e-learning activities. The generic model of e-learning is presented without emphasis on specific software and hardware solutions. We focus on the major necessities like reusability or interoperability of content and technologies and revise the current standards regarding these two aspects. The most popular infrastructure models are presented in details and the related committees and organizations involved in the standardization process are referenced. As an epilogue to this presentation we provide our insights for a global standard, which will cover all aspects of elearning and will be supported by all related organizations, vendors, institutions and individual educators. We illustrate the steps for the successful configuration and deployment of a globally accepted standard and display the merits of this approach.

0227557 respectively. Any opinions expressed in this work are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent either those of the funding agency or the University of Michigan. Context-Specific vs. Generic Scaffolds A student’s success at performing a scientific inquiry practice requires both domain specific knowledge and knowledge of the general practice. In this study, we investigated whether providing students with written curricular scaffolds that focus on the content and task (context-specific) or on the practice of constructing a scientific explanation (generic) better supported middle school student in writing scientific explanation where they justified their claims with appropriate evidence and reasoning. To address this research question, we collected data with six teachers and 578 middle school students during the 2004-2005 school year. All six teachers enacted an 8-week standards-based chemistry curriculum, How can I make new stuff from old stuff?, designed to support 7 th grade students in their understanding of chemistry content and scientific inquiry practices. We created two versions of the curriculum, one with context-specific scaffolds and one with generic explanation scaffolds. We then randomly

ABSTRACT: The work presented builds on a multiyear effort to study the implementation and adaptation of Kids as Global Scientists (KGS), an inquiry-based, technology-rich middle school learning environment enacted simultaneously in hundreds of classrooms across the nation. Two groups of teachers participated in this study. One group consists of “maverick ” teachers: those distributed across the nation that find us and customize our program to their needs without systematic professional development. This group of teachers tends to work in schools with a relatively rich fund of resources and supports. Another group—urban teachers—resulted from a recent partnership between KGS and teachers from a large, high-poverty urban school district. We provide these teachers with targeted professional development to help them overcome constraints common to their schools. This study provides profiles of both maverick and urban teachers, and then examines teacher and student data from five focus classrooms that were successful in implementing KGS. In all cases, successful classrooms were defined as those where students made significant positive gains on open-ended and multiple-choice assessments. The focus classrooms consisted of three classrooms from urban teachers in high-poverty environments and two classrooms from maverick teachers in middle-class suburban environments. The paper discusses the need for research that provides multiple exemplars of classroom science inquiry that are realized through large-scale enactments responsive to diverse learning environments.

"...If the network idea should prove to do for education which a few have envisioned... and if all minds should prove to be responsive, surely the boon to humankind would be beyond measure. " J.C.R. Licklider & Robert Taylor (1968) Ten years ago, we launched the Learning through Collaborative Visualization, or CoVis Project. "Collaborative visualization " refers to development of scientific knowledge that is mediated by scientific visualization tools in a collaborative learning context. Funded by the National Science Foundation as an advanced networking testbed, our partnership of

Educational assessment is a process of drawing reasonable inferences about what students know on the basis of evidence derived from observation of what they say, do or make in selected situations. Educational assessment does not exist in isolation, but should be aligned with instruction in order to support and enhance learning. Assessment functions may be varied, ranging from a need to identify the students’ prior knowledge to a need to draw conclusions about their overall understanding of the subject matter. In this paper, a coherent and integrated framework for educational assessment purposes, serving various assessment functions, is presented. The framework named AssessToLearn uses concept maps as the main tool of the assessment toolbox and provides a basis for the design of assessment activities following

In today’s economic and technological environment, individuals continually face the challenge of acquiring new knowledge and skills. To be successful, people must be “intelligent novices ” (Mathan & Koedinger, 2003), able to get up to speed quickly in a new domain. Metacognitive skills are often regarded as key to being a good learner