This qualitative study indicates that Chinese origin students completing their pre-university education in a British school have particular difficulties related to sociocultural change, pedagogical differences, affective aspects, cognitive demand and language learning. These are discussed. The use of a pre-laboratory software resource to support…

The teaching of scientific subjects usually require laboratories where students can put the theory they have learned into practice. Traditionally, electronic programmable calculators, dedicated software, or expensive software simulation packages, such as MATLAB have been used to simulate scientific experiments. Recently, spreadsheet programs have…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a case study of City & Guilds' development of simulation-based assessments for its ICT user qualification. These simulations are authentic scenario-based replicas of word processing and spreadsheet software, which present a series of tasks that the test-taker completes as if they were using…

This paper presents a multimodal discourse analysis of children using "drill-and-practice" literacy software at a primary school in the Western Cape, South Africa. The children's interactions with the software are analysed. The software has serious limitations which arise from the global political economy of the educational software…