In many countries, computer programming is becoming an integral part of the secondary school curriculum. However, many teachers, especially in the first years of Flemish secondary school, have limited experience with teaching programming. To improve their knowledge about programming, many different types of professional development programs have…

Behavioral studies have reported interactions between number processing and spatial attention, suggesting that number processing involves shifting attention along a mental continuum on which numbers are represented in ascending order. However, direct evidence for attention shifts remains scarce, the respective contribution of the horizontal and…

The aim of this study was to develop a coding scheme that enables researchers and practitioners to conduct a detailed analysis of the communicative behavior of young children with significant cognitive and motor developmental delays. Currently, there is a paucity of methods to do conduct such an analysis. For the study, video observations of three…

Over the past decade an increasing number of studies across a range of domains have shown that the repeated performance of approach and avoidance (AA) actions in response to a stimulus leads to changes in the evaluation of that stimulus. The dominant (motivational-systems) account in this area claims that these effects are caused by a rewiring of…

This study reports on the design of a video-based instrument to assess student teachers' parent-teacher communication competences (PTCC) in a reliable and valid way. PTCC refer to the competences needed to communicate successfully with parents during conversations such as parent-teacher conferences. Taking into account both conceptual and…

Thus far, professional editing has not been researched extensively in writing research. This article zooms in on sub-editing in newswriting as a form of professional editing, addressing three research questions: (a) What are the ways in which a news article's text is altered?, (b) Are some types of news article altered more significantly than…

Background: According to the classroom ecology paradigm, teachers and students interpret, predict, and respond to each other repeatedly in a reciprocal way. Such a reciprocal relationship is reflected in bidirectional interactions between a teacher's behavior and student (dis)engagement, an issue that has been confirmed in longitudinal studies…

This research analyzed how fractions are taught in the fourth grade of elementary school in Flanders. Analysis centered on the presence of five features of instruction recommended by research on teaching and learning fractions (i.e., multiple solution pathways, linking representations, estimation and justification of the solution, collaboration,…

This article presents the findings of a qualitative study (carried out between 2011 and 2013) about the adoption and implementation of learning paths within a Learning Management System (LMS). Sixteen secondary school biology teachers of the GO! Network in Flanders (an urbanized region in Belgium) were involved in the study and questioned via…

Since research shows that the quality of a school's teaching force is related to its personnel practices, there is a growing interest in human resource management (HRM) in education. Existing research has generated insights into the differences, constraints and effects of single and isolated HR practices. Yet, little research is available…

Since their discovery in the early 1990s, mirror neurons have been proposed to be related to many social-communicative abilities, such as imitation. However, research into the early manifestations of the putative neural mirroring system and its role in early social development is still inconclusive. In the current EEG study, mu suppression,…

One possible way of evaluating set curricula is to examine the consistency of study programmes with students' psycho-cognitive development. Three theories were used to evaluate matching between developmental theories and content proposed in the mathematics programmes (geometry section) for primary and the beginning of secondary education. These…

Background: The measurement of subjective well-being in people with severe and profound intellectual disabilities (ID) is a difficult challenge. As they cannot self-report about their life satisfaction, because of severe communicative and cognitive limitations, behavioural observations of their emotions and moods are important in the measurement…

This paper investigates the effects of Content and Language Integrated Learning, CLIL for short, on both the attainment of the subject matter, mathematics in our case, hence the content aspect of CLIL. The second axes of research focuses on the effect of CLIL on the learners' proficiency vis-à-vis the language of instruction, epitomized here by…

In recent studies, researchers have discovered a larger neural activation for stimuli that are more extreme exemplars of their stimulus class, compared with stimuli that are more prototypical. This has been shown for faces as well as for familiar and novel shape classes. We used a visual search task to look for a behavioral correlate of these…