Analysis: The fourth level of Bloom's Taxonomy, analysis requires the student to examine and break information down into parts to examine and understand its meaning. This level requires students to "read between the lines," make inferences, and find evidence to support generalizations.

Application: This is the third level of ability in Bloom's Taxonomy. It is seen when students use methods, theories, or concepts in new situations. Instead of simply interpreting a graph, they might construct a new graph using the data, or use a learned formula to actually solve an equation.

Asynchronous: Occurring at different times. In the context of communication, the label asynchronous is used with technologies such as email and threaded discussions where users communicate with no expectation of receiving an immediate response from other communicators.

Bloom, Benjamin: An educational psychologist who, along with some colleagues, is responsible for the development of a scale for categorizing student activities in the cognitive domain.

Bloom's Taxonomy: A group of educational psychologists led by Benjamin considered student abilities in the cognitive domain, ranking these behaviors from plain and simple to the most complex. Bloom divides student cognitive abilities into the following six categories: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. This ranking has become known as Bloom's Taxonomy.

Bridging: This scaffolding technique provides a personal connection between the learner and the theme of the class, and taps into the student's prior knowledge relevant to the class theme. Brainstorming about a topic prior to a lesson is an example of bridging.

Bruner, Jerome: The term "scaffolding" was first used by Jerome Bruner in his book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986) to describe the assistance that a teacher gives a student to help him/her safely take risks and reach higher than would be possible by the students efforts alone.

Communicating: For the purposes of this module communicating is a category of activities in which students engage in a learning environment. Communicating activities are characterized by their purpose, directionality of information flow, and in some cases their placement in the course of study. Communicating activities are undertaken to help students use and test ideas they are formulating, expand their scope of inquiry, build relationships with others, and to learn more about a subject. Communicating activities usually have some degree of bidirectional information exchange. Finally, communicating activities occur throughout the unit of study and are not considered summative in nature.

Comprehension: The second level of student ability in Bloom's taxonomy is called "comprehension" and requires a student to demonstrate an understanding of the information. Students may show this by summarizing main ideas, translating a mathematical word problem to numbers, or by interpreting charts or graphs.

Contextualization: This scaffold creates a clear experiential environment that familiarizes new, unknown concepts and throws light on them. Visualizations, focus questions, and use of manipulatives are all helpful. Input is made comprehensible through a variety of means which manipulate the content of the materials that teachers include in their lessons.

Creative Reporting: It often does not have the more formal and stylized structures that may be present in the other types of reporting. Typically, creative reporting deals with reality through a fictional tool. For example, a student may attempt to express the African American inner city contemporary experience through the creation of a script or a poem.

Evaluation: The sixth and highest level of student ability in Bloom's Taxonomy is called "evaluation." This level requires the student to present and defend opinions while making judgments about the value of material and methods for a given purpose.

Expository Reporting: Expository reporting tends to be an unemotional attempt to simply inform an audience. It deals with explaining how to do something, and is also often used in the writing of step-by-step instructions in technical manuals.

Gardner, Howard-Gardner: is best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments (I.Q. tests).

Graphic Organizer: a diagram or picture of important summary information in a lesson.

Knowledge: The lowest level of student ability in Bloom's Taxonomy is known as "knowledge." This category involves simple knowledge of dates, events, places, facts, terms, basic concepts, or answers.

Metacognitive Development: This scaffold supports students' internalization of strategies through a conscious focus on the implementation of plans of attack, and fosters student autonomy through self-monitoring and self-assessment.

Modeling: This scaffolding technique clarifies procedures through direct experience, and provides concrete examples of what a student's finished product should look like. The main idea here is that any task that is introduced for the first time should be modeled, and that students need to be given clear samples of what is requested of them for imitation.

Narrative Reporting: The focus of narrative reporting is on events, details and descriptions, and usually answers the who, what, where, why and how. It asks the presenter to put events and actions in a certain order that lead to a complication or problem.

Persuasive Reporting: The chief goal in the persuasive reporting of information is to get people to agree with the reporter's specific point of view. The intent is to convince the audience to either take action or come around to a particular way of looking at something. The topic of the presentation is generally debatable, ending with a call to action.

Reporting: For the purposes of this module reporting is a category of activities in which students organize and present information in a learning environment. Reporting activities are characterized by their purpose, directionality of information flow, and in some cases their placement in the course of study. Reporting activities usually have some degree of one-way information transmission. Finally, reporting activities usually occur at the end of the unit of study and are considered summative in nature.

Rubric: an evaluation scale.

Scaffolding Instruction: Scaffolding Instruction is a way for educators to provide support mechanisms to allow learners to handle complex tasks, with the eventual goal of learner autonomy.

Schema: This term refers to the background knowledge about a subject that a student already knows before a topic is introduced.

Schema Building: This scaffold helps students establish the connections that exist between and across concepts that may otherwise appear unrelated, and helps students gain perspective with regards to where ideas fit in the larger scheme of things.

Synchronous: Occurring at the same time. In the context of communication, the label synchronous is used with technologies such as chat and conferencing, which occur in near real-time. Users in the communication environment send and receive messages with very little lag time.

Synthesis: This is the fifth level in Bloom's taxonomy and deals with the task of putting together parts to form a new whole. This might involve working with parts and putting them together in a creative new way, or using old ideas to come up with new ones.

Text Representation: Text Representation is a scaffold that invites students to extend their understandings and apply them in novel formats. Students might work in groups to pick out a symbol that presents itself in a difficult passage, draw that symbol, and write a quote that illustrates the choice of symbol. In this way the text has been presented in a new way, which may help some of the students understand the contents of the article more clearly.

Vygotsky, Lev: A theorist who developed Social Development Theory. Born in 1896 and living until 1934 his work has been re-discovered following the warming of relations between the old Soviet Union and the United states in the post cold-war world.

Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): This is Lev Vygotsky's term for the time between which a child can solve a certain problem only with help from another and the time when the child can solve the same problem on their own. Vygotsky believed that the ZPD was a crucial time for full social engagement of the child in order to achieve maximum learning.