Teachers' beliefs about skills play a significant role in how they teach those skills. Similarly, students' mastery of a skill is influenced by their ideas about its value and what the performance of the skill exactly entails. In this study, 10 history teachers and 17 students in secondary school (age 16-17) were interviewed about their beliefs…

Grounded in Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory, this paper examines how often teachers are involved in children's imaginative play and discusses their beliefs about their role in supporting children's imaginative play. To investigate this problem, video (65 hours of digital observations) and interview data (two hours and 30 minutes) of 60…

Mental imagery has been implicated in anxiety disorders in adults, but has not been investigated in child and adolescent populations. Anxiety is highly prevalent in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and as people with ASD are often thought of as "visual thinkers," the potential role of distressing imagery in children with ASD merits…

In a time when story-acting practices have gained increasing focus, little is known about the relations between family story acting and a child's interactions with the ideal models represented in stories. Drawing upon a cultural-historical perspective of play and development, this study is aimed at discovering how a child is able to interact with…

Many educators in adult, community and higher education contexts are concerned with fostering reflective learning amongst their students. This paper explores the concept of critical reflection and considers how engaging with fiction may be an innovative pedagogical approach to support critical learning opportunities. Drawing upon interviews with…

The hypothesis that brain activity may differ during varied types of video game play was investigated in two studies of event-related potentials exhibited by children age 7 to 12 when processing game-based stimuli requiring correct/incorrect responses or choices between two imaginative alternative responses. The first study had 22 children of…

Creativity is the critical point to developing innovative and effective citizens and children in learning social studies. The purpose of this study is to explore how creativity is promoted in social studies classrooms for young children and to research teachers' opinions and interpretations of creativity in Turkish elementary schools. The study…

Professional training for designers is crucial in the field of design studies. The characteristics of novices versus those of expert designers have been identified in the literature; however, studies exploring the issue of professional training processes in the actual workplace are not well developed. Our study addresses the topic by using…

The processes and patterns of strategies used by children when drawing on the computer with friends and acquaintances were investigated in a case study. The participants were five-and-six-year-old children and the study took place in their home settings. The data collection methods consisted of interviews, observations, audio recordings, video…

This article explores the author's embodied experience of linguistic incompetence in the context of an interview-based, short, promotional film production about people's personal connections to their spoken languages in Glasgow, Scotland/UK. The article highlights that people's right to their spoken languages during film interviews and the…

This paper argues that process drama is a productive pedagogy with multiple affordances for multiliteracies. We describe an exploratory study in which two teachers from a rural New Zealand primary school used process drama pedagogy in the literacy programme. Analysis of the initial and exit teacher interviews, lesson transcripts and transcripts of…

This article reports findings from an evaluation study of a 10-week interactive drama residency in a large Head Start preschool in a southeastern state. The goal of the study was to learn about what happened when three to five-year old children and their teachers experienced interactive drama, with particular questions about how the young…

The purpose of the study was to examine Japanese and Korean kindergarteners' perspectives by asking them to photograph play and explain why their photos represent play (photo elicitation interviews). The participants consisted of 50 kindergarteners on Japan's main island and 50 kindergarteners in South Korea. Japanese and Korean kindergartners…

This article focuses on the effects of an arts-based intervention for young people deemed at risk of school exclusion because of social, emotional and behavioural difficulties. Using a range of qualitative methods, including observations and interviews, the study explored from the perspective of 11 young people (aged 11-16) the potential for…

Outdoor preschools are critical for children's play and development. Integrating observational and interview methods, this study examined four-to-five-year-old children's cognitive play experiences in an outdoor preschool with natural, mixed and manufactured zones. The observational results indicated that the natural and mixed zones offered a…