There has been an increased frequency of leadership courses being taught online. Scant research exists that describes effective practices for teaching leadership online. This application brief describes an assignment, the "Real Life Leader in the Mirror" given to undergraduate students in an online personal leadership course as an end of…

It has often been lamented that girls are more likely not to attend or to drop-out (for example, because of gender preference by the parents, insecurity, pregnancy, amongst many other postulated factors) or that their achievement even if they stay in school is worse than boys. For the former, UNESCO introduced the Gender Parity Index (GPI), which…

This paper describes instructional choices used by two high school teachers to engage students in the research process. Working with diverse learners in large urban high schools, the teachers used different approaches to support students' through the research process. The teachers' intentional teaching helped to engage students through structured…

The purpose of the current study was to examine the relationships among the Challenges to Scholastic Achievement Scale-Revised (CSAS-R) and The School Attitude Assessment Survey-Revised (SAAS-R) items and factors to determine whether the negative scales on the CSAS-R seemed to be measuring the same constructs as those that are measured on the…

Testing subject has many subsets and connections. One important issue is how to assess or measure students or learners. What would be our tools, what would be our style, what would be our goal and so on. So in this paper the author attended to the style of testing in school and other educational settings. Since the purposes of educational system…

A central goal of the learning sciences is to discover principles that determine the optimal amount of instructional assistance to support robust learning (Koedinger & Aleven, 2007). We examined learning outcomes from providing and withholding stepwise instructional explanations as students studied worked examples and solved physics problems. We…

Arguments regarding the distinction between child and adult learning have existed for decades. Pedagogy has a long tradition of providing educational guidance in which there is little differentiation between child and adult education. The two groups of learners are assumed to learn under the same philosophy. Conversely, andragogy, advanced by…

Digital educational games (DEGs) possess the potential of providing an appealing and intrinsically motivating learning context. Usually this potential is either taken for granted or examined through questionnaires or interviews in the course of evaluation studies. However, an "adaptive" game would increase the probability of a DEG being…

Both the popular media and professional literature are filled with suggestions on how to improve reading, but the one approach that always works is rarely mentioned: provide readers with a supply of interesting and comprehensible books. Instead, people are given advice that is dead wrong as a means of improving reading (e.g., roller skating and…

This newsletter of best practices in implementing the High Schools That Work (HSTW), Making Middle Grades Work (MMGW) and Technology Centers That Work (TCTW) school improvement models is based on presentations at the 27th Annual HSTW Staff Development Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in the summer of 2013. The newsletter is divided up into…

Two novel technologies--digitized oral feedback on written work and the Turning Point classroom active response system--were introduced into my undergraduate educational psychology course. The cognitive and motivational academic benefits of each were compared to more traditional pedagogy over the course of one full semester. Students who received…

Plant growth, development and reproduction are fundamental concepts in biology; yet there is a recorded lack of motivation for young people to grapple with these concepts. Here we present the "DigitalSeed" toy for making investigations around these concepts more accessible to children through hands-on digital interaction. This is part of an…

Teachable agent is a type of pedagogical agent which instantiates Learning-by-Teaching theory through simulating a "naive" learner in order to motivate students to teach it. This paper discusses the limitation of existing teachable agents and incorporates intrinsic motivation to the agent model to enable teachable agents with initiative…

This paper describes staff perceptions of the implementation of an alternative curriculum, Skill Force, for disaffected pupils in the UK. The perceptions of Skill Force and school staff were compared based on data from questionnaires completed by 62 Skill Force and 84 school staff, and interviews with representative samples of each. While the data…

Within the context of broad literature on cross-border flows for higher education, this article examines the distinctive case of mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong and Macau. These territories are a sort of bridge between the fully domestic and the fully international. Hong Kong and Macau higher education plays a dual role, as a destination in…