Educational reform centres on changing teacher behaviour, as it is teachers who filter through the curriculum to learners. Educational reform could therefore be viewed as reforming or changing teacher behaviour. This article investigates some of the factors influencing teachers' behaviour namely knowledge, attitude and views and beliefs. The…

Four dimensions of pedagogical quality focusing on children's opportunities for learning and development in preschool are suggested. This article explores how they are constituted and how they can be used for evaluation to discern pedagogical quality as a whole and part of a whole and to understand how quality is experienced and valued from…

Developers of educational multimedia programs have expectations about the way in which they will be used. These expectations can be broadly categorised as either functional (primarily related to the interface) or educational (related to learning designs, processes and outcomes). However, student users will not always engage with educational…

Students are, increasingly, digital content producers, and participate extensively in evolving online social networks. The emergence of the former represents subtle changes in students' experience of images, audience, copyright, ownership of learning, and technology. Experiencing the latter places students in an awkward position in terms of…

This study examined the potential of indicators such as student learning approaches, student self-concept, and attitudes to school life to discriminate between high and low performing secondary schools as categorized by external achievement measures. The sample consisted of 10 Adelaide (South Australia) schools: 5 of the highest performing schools…

A popular image today is that students are "consumers" and teachers are "producers" and "sellers" of education. Many in academia claim that economic metaphors distort and corrupt the true nature of education and they offer a variety of alternative images of the relationships between teachers and students: traveler/guide, worker/boss, artistic…

Noting the importance of including parents in school change, this descriptive study investigates parents' beliefs about teaching and learning high school English. Twenty-five parents of high school students enrolled in an untracked interdisciplinary English course were interviewed. Participants were shown photographs of different classrooms and…

In the Student Development Tutoring Model (SDTM), tutors engage students with content in such a way as to both increase their understanding of content as well as their ability to use learning strategies independently in the future. To develop and evaluate a procedure for preparing tutors to use behaviors consistent with the SDTM, New York's Bronx…

Instructional metacognition refers both to conceptions of students about the contribution that instructional interventions can make to their learning, and to the impact of these conceptions on students' interpretation and use of instructional interventions. This study analyzes student conceptions of efficiency-related attributes of instructional…

This study examined the effects of goals--such as denoting learning and performance outcomes--and self-evaluation on the acquisition of computer skills, efficacy in performing computer tasks, perception of competence for the use of self-regulatory strategies, and frequency of strategy use while learning computer skills. Subjects were 44 college…

Reflecting the complexity of the early childhood education enterprise--classroom practice, teacher preparation, research, and conceptualization--this volume reflects an examination of the literature for illumination as to the value of early education theory and its usefulness to practice. The book has 10 chapters divided into three parts that…

The purpose of this study was to develop and validate an instrument to assess students' culturally sensitive environments and to examine the associations between these factors and students' attitudes towards science. A measure of students' environment, namely, the Cultural Learning Environment Questionnaire (CLEQ), was developed. The instrument…

Portfolio assessment can be different in kind from traditional assessment measures: it can provide a fuller picture of the learner; it can be much more than an expanded grade book; but the criteria and language for evaluating and describing the portfolio must be different from those used for evaluating individual products. To describe the fuller…

This book offers a reflective examination of the purposes of undergraduate education and argues for an integrated pedagogy that is intersubjective, interdisciplinary, and intercultural. The book is divided into three general parts. The first four chapters offer a systematic search for the first principles of education, including the educational…

This study investigated students' metacognitive and intellectual development within the context of academic training, achievement, and personality type, using two longitudinal data sets from a four-year public institution. The first set included 408 male students of the 1996 cohort; the second was comprised of 419 male students of the class of…