This volume explores the integration of recent research on everyday, classroom, and professional scientific thinking. It brings together an international group of researchers to present core findings from each context; discuss connections between contexts, and explore structures; technologies, and environments to facilitate the development and practice of scientific thinking. The chapters focus on: * situations from young children visiting museums, * middle-school students collaborating in classrooms, * undergraduates learning about research methods, and * professional scientists engaged in cutting-edge research. A diverse set of approaches are represented, including sociocultural description of situated cognition, cognitive enthnography, educational design experiments, laboratory studies, and artificial intelligence. This unique mix of work from the three contexts deepens our understanding of each subfield while at the same time broadening our understanding of how each subfield articulates with broader issues of scientific thinking. To provide a common focus for exploring connections between everyday, instructional, and professional scientific thinking, the book uses a "practical implications" subtheme. In particular, each chapter has direct implications for the design of learning environments to facilitate scientific thinking. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Available as an E-Inspection Copy! Link: http://www.ebooks.com/1631711/child-development/crowley-kevin/ Children change rapidly. Not only in the physical sense but in their abilities to communicate, think and to interact. This development is fascinating and has a huge impact on the care, education and wellbeing of children...read more

What do people learn from visiting museums and how do they learn it? The editors approach this question by focusing on conversations as both the process and the outcome of museum learning. People do not come to museums to talk, but they often do talk. This talk can drift from discussions of managing the visit, to remembrances of family members and friends not present, to close analyses of particular objects or displays. This volume explores how these conversations reflect and change a visitor's identity, discipline-specific knowledge, and engagement with an informal learning environment that has been purposefully constructed by an almost invisible community of designers, planners, and educators. Fitting nicely into a small but rapidly expanding market, this book presents: *one of the first theoretically grounded set of studies on museum learning; *an explicit presentation of innovative and rich methodologies on learning in museums; *information on a variety of museums and subject matter; *a study on exhibitions, ranging from art to science content; *authors from the museum and the academic world; *a range of methods--from the analysis of diaries written to record museum visits, to studies of preservice teachers using pre- and post-museum visit tests; *an examination of visitors ranging from age 4-75 years of age, and from known and unknown sample populations; and *a lens that examines museum visits in a fine grained (1 second) or big picture (week, year long) way.

Product Description: An Introduction to Child Development, Third Edition provides undergraduate students in psychology and other disciplines with a comprehensive survey of the main areas of child development, from infancy through to adolescence, in a readily accessible format...read more