Innovation has become an increasingly important concept for Australian businesses in enabling them to continue to compete in an international market, but where does vocational education and training (VET) sit in this? To date, VET has been largely overlooked by the National Innovation and Science Agenda as a potential contributor in this field.…

In order to teach about sustainability, teachers need to be able to translate their personal understanding of this concept into their pedagogy in ways that make it accessible to their learners. This translation process is known as pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). This study investigated the way that two teachers translated their understanding…

This study investigates the relationship between performances on the speaking component of the TOEFL iBTTM with performances on academic oral assessment tasks. For the academic tasks, we recorded and transcribed the performances of five local and five high-achieving international undergraduate students on oral assessment tasks in core first-year…

This article takes a critical comparative approach to examining autonomous schooling in the United States and Australia. Amid the market imperatives currently driving education priorities, its focus is on how autonomy can be mobilized in ways that preserve the integrity of public education. Through reference to key debates and research about…

Idioms feature prominently in daily communication. Accordingly, teaching and learning idioms should be a primary concern in language education, including English education. However, there is relatively little research on the role of formal instruction of idioms in developing idiomatic competence. This study investigated the instructional effects…

Undergraduate students have historically engaged with the humanities and social sciences through the Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree programme. Recent experiences suggest that the relevance and the value of the degree to the modern world is now being challenged: populist press questions the value of the humanities to the modern knowledge economy;…

This paper presents an educational, experimental research design, aiming at examining the effect of "PAD + microlectures" EAP teaching model on Chinese undergraduates' critical thinking development. It mainly analyzes this experiment from four aspects: research question and hypotheses, difficulties in key term definitions and selection…

Shared reading represents an established practice to foster preschool vocabulary development, particularly when coupled with explicit instruction in word meanings. However, a question remains as to whether explicit word definitions detract from story delivery and hence language learning. Accordingly, this study compared explicit versus…

The aim of the present research was to examine adolescents' definitions of bullying in a nationally representative sample of adolescents in Ireland. Definitions of bullying were examined according to age, gender, and bullying experiences. A sample of 4358 adolescents aged 12-19 years (M = 14.99 years, SD = 1.63) provided their definitions of…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether teachers' ability to identify bullying incidents could be enhanced by offering bullying identification trainings. The participants of this study were 532 primary, middle, and high school teachers in Taiwan, who were recruited to participate in one of the four study groups (three treatment groups…

Words that are part of colloquial English but used differently in a technical domain may possess lexical ambiguity. The use of such words by instructors may inhibit student learning if incorrect connections are made by students between the technical and colloquial meanings. One fundamental word in statistics that has lexical ambiguity for students…

Since the 1960s, there has been growing and sustained interest in small-group learning approaches at the school level and in higher education. A voluminous body of literature in this area addresses theory, research, classroom practice, and faculty development. The approaches most highly represented in the literature are cooperative learning,…

About one-quarter of Canadian adults and more than one-third of adults in the United States are obese. Obese children are at risk of becoming obese adults and can experience immediate health consequences such as psychosocial stress, elevated blood pressure and cholesterol, and abnormal glucose tolerance. Monitoring trends in childhood obesity is…

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA; P.L. 108-446) is the primary source of federal funding to states for the identification and education of children with disabilities. The majority of IDEA appropriations are allocated to states by formula to carry out activities under Part B, which covers 14 disability categories. Each state is…

Sharing scientific research data has become increasingly important for knowledge advancement in today's networked, digital world. This article describes the evolution of access to United States government information in relation to scientific research funded by federal grants. It analyzes the data sharing policy of the National Science Foundation,…