A subject of growing interest in mathematics education is the affective domain and its effects on the teaching and learning processes, giving rise to different models of its components and conditioning factors. In this paper, we apply the ontological and semiotic categories from the Onto-Semiotic Approach (OSA) to research in mathematics…

Play is widely acknowledged as being critical for children's development, yet opportunities for play are becoming more scarce for many children.

Cognitive conflict arises when students' expectation about a physical situation, such as the relative temperatures of metal and cloth, are not experimentally verified. The paper reviews this approach as a tool for promoting conceptual learning in undergraduate engineering courses, through three case studies. These cases demonstrate that cognitive…

Gunther Kress's multimodal and social semiotic theory of communication has moved beyond the realm of linguistics, which originally framed his work, and has reached out to inform other fields, such as those of education, museum studies, as well as the humanities and social sciences more broadly. This article brings together our insights in relation…

While learning involves the acquisition of skills and the development of repertoires, some educators harbor even more profound learning goals, seeking to enable learning that is transformative. Theorizing about transformative learning posits that it is precipitated by a disorienting dilemma. Disorienting dilemmas may be thought of as times when…

The author relates their involvement in the process of testing a picture storybook to teach science concepts. The project asked: If children were learning through a story where the science content was explicit, would children be able to explain the science in the context of the story and then in real-world contexts? Would the learning become…

Designing for and implementing deeper learning across classrooms and schools that serve communities disadvantaged by the U.S. educational system is challenging. This paper illuminates this challenge by asking the question: What would designers of interventions at the classroom, school, and district levels have to take into consideration when they…

The rationale behind this special issue is to underscore the importance of studying instructional materials in context--that is, how materials and textbooks are used by teachers and learners. Research on teaching materials needs to reach beyond traditional 'armchair' analyses and evaluations to appreciate the place of instructional materials in…

According to Jim Knight, learning something new--such as a new instructional approach or other innovation--and applying it in practice is complex and involves adaptations that take time. Knight describes the five stages he believes people go through in learning and practicing any innovation, from "non-use," gradually up to the stage of…

When Trudy Knowles needed a change in her elementary curriculum class, she decided to teach her students to juggle. Her excuse was that juggling would impress their future students, but she soon realized that learning a skill like juggling can give teachers a better understanding of how students feel when they learn something new. Here, she shares…

This provocative article raises many important issues that need to be addressed and in so doing will advance the fields of second language (L2) and third language (L3) acquisition in several important ways. Fundamental questions concerning multilingual development persist especially with respect to the role of Universal Grammar in this language…

In Pangbisa village in Paro, Bhutan, a unique institution is a testament to His Majesty the King's recognition of the critical role of education in enriching the lives of people and the society, nurturing successive generations of leaders and building a strong, secure, and prosperous nation. The Royal Academy consists of three centers--the School,…

Jiddu Krishnamurti was a contemporary of the first non-European Nobel Laureate from Asia, Rabindranath Tagore. Their educational ideas and practices of reform were deeply informed by their own troubled experiences of schooling within the highly mechanised industrial model of education imported from colonial England. Both were school dropouts and…

This paper proposes the replication of Bird's (2010) and Serrano's (2011) studies, which examined distribution of practice effects in second language acquisition (SLA). These studies, which took place in authentic classroom contexts, produced conflicting results regarding the degree to which the learning of a second language (L2) benefited from…

Transformative learning theory has provided a sound theoretical base for adult education's Western and Eastern academic field. This article aims to introduce the mandala model of transformative learning by transferring Mezirow's theory of perspective transformation onto a mandala map. In the mandala model, the learning agent exercises two…