This study examines the experience of beginning teachers in their first year of teaching using reflection that reveals successes, challenges, musings, and deliberations. The study was conducted in the qualitative approach using analysis of categories and themes during an academic course at Beit Berl College in Israel. Analysis of the reflections…

The experiences of course facilitators in connectivist-type MOOCs are poorly reported. Yet there is evidence that the values and beliefs of facilitators have an important impact on the learning experiences of participants, and that reducing their interactions with students may also reduce the effectiveness of the course. This study aimed to…

Scholars are calling increasingly for educational reform to embed meaningful out-of-class events in the current curriculum, in order to enhance students' generic competency development. Towards this goal, featuring self-confidence as an important generic competency, this mixed-method study explores key characteristics of extracurricular activities…

In this article the connection between transfer, interaction and reflective thinking is analyzed, especially within the context of learning mathematics. Attention is paid to the question of how to use or to explore the knowledge that has already been acquired. It may be relevant to make a distinction between the "classical" concept of…

This paper was inspired by three important concerns in higher education, namely, changes in higher education curricula (Bourner, 2004), concept of a fully functioning university (Bourner, 2008), and nature of education, such a university offers (Bourner, Heath, & Rospigliosi, 2013). To prepare university graduates for the unpredictable changes…

From the 1930s onwards, the problem of the transition from primary to secondary school has been a source of discussion and contradiction in the Netherlands. For many years it has been disputed whether this transition problem should be conceived as a problem of selection (testing) or as an educational problem (reforming the instruction and…

The focus of this article is a theoretical discussion and analysis of the concept of intuition. The article investigates how intuition, in the psychological sense, is connected with concepts like problem-solving, reflective thinking, automatized thinking activities and understanding 'gestalt' or structure and meaning. Automatisms are based on…

This paper describes the result of a design study in which a geography course was developed and tested aiming to develop the Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) of first-year primary student teachers. This resulted in a course called "Consciously Teaching Geography" with characteristics as (1) starting from students' preconceptions and…

This article explores the need to locate individuals' personal life stories in their life histories when the narrative approach to studying different aspects of teachers is used. This is partly done by revealing the limitations of the narrow focus on personal stories in research on teachers when it is restricted to researching teachers' personal…