1. Learner-centered environments
(1) Including teaching practices that have been called “culturally responsive,” “culturally appropriate,” “culturally compatible,” and “culturally relevant.” (Ladson-Billings, 1995)
(2) Fits the concept of “diagnostic teaching” (Bell et al., 1980)
(3) Teachers are aware that learners construct their own meanings, beginning with the belief, understandings, and cultural practices they bring to the classroom.
2. Knowledge-centered environments
(1) Taking seriously the need to help students become knowledgeable (Bruner, 1981) by learning in ways that lead to understanding and subsequent transfer.
(2) Using “progressive formalization” to develop curricula that support learning with understanding and encourage sense making
(3) Another alternative to a “rutted path” curriculum is one of “learning the landscape” (Greeno, 1991). Here learning is analogous to learning to live in an environment: learning your way around, learning what resources are available, and learning how to use those resources in conducting your activities productively and enjoyably (Greeno, 1991:175)
(4) Ideas are best introduced when students see a need or a reason for their use—this helps them see relevant uses of knowledge to make sense of what they are learning. (P.139)
(5) A challenge for the design of knowledge-centered environments is to strike the appropriate balance between activities designed to promote understanding and those designed to promote the automaticity of skills necessary to function effectively without being overwhelmed by attentional requirements (P.139).
3. Assessment-centered environments
(1) The key principles of assessment are that they should provide opportunities for feedback and revision and that what is assessed must be congruent with one’s learning goals.
(2) Formative assessment involves the use of assessments (usually administered in the context of the classroom) as sources of feedback to improve teaching and learning; summative assessment measures what students have learned at the end of some set of learning activities (P.140).
(3) Feedback is most valuable when students have the opportunities to use it to revise their thinking as they are working on a unit or project (P.141).
4. Community-centered environments
(1) A key environment for learning is the family. Even when family members do not focus on instructional roles, they provide resources for children’s learning, activities in which learning occurs, and connections to community (Moll,
5. Television provides images and role models that can affect how children view themselves, how they see others, attitudes about what academic subjects they should be interested in, and other topics related to person perception. The image can have both positive and negative effect (P.150).
6. Children can also misinterpret programs about people form different cultures, depending on what they already know (Newcomb and Collins, 1979). Stereotyping represents a powerful effect of watching television that is potentially negative (P.151). Experimental studies indicate that such stereotyping effects decrease with children as young as 5 if adults offer critiques of the stereotypic portrayals as the children watch programs (Dorr, 1982).
7. A focus on the degree to which environments are learner centered is consistent with the strong body of evidence suggesting that learners’ use their current knowledge to construct new knowledge and that what they know and believe at the moment affects how they interpret new information (P.153).
1. Methods: the techniques or procedures used to gather and analyze data related to some research question or hypothesis (e.g., questionnaire, observation, interview, measurement and scaling, sampling, case study, statistical analysis…)
2. Methodology: the strategy, plan of action, process or design lying behind the choice and use of particular methods and linking the choice and use of methods to the desired outcomes (e.g., survey research, experimental research, ethnography, grounded theory, action research, phenomenological research, discourse analysis)
3. Theoretical perspective: the philosophical stance informing the methodology and thus providing a context for the process and grounding its logic and criteria (e.g., positivism/post-positivism; interpretivism such as symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics; feminism; critical inquiry; postmodernism)
4. Epistemology: the theory of knowledge embedded in the theoretical perspective and thereby in the methodology (e.g., Objectivism, Constructionism, Subjectivism)
