This study was aimed at clarifying relations between the way students learn and personal, contextual and performance variables. Students from seven different academic disciplines completed the Inventory of Learning Styles (ILS). Besides, data about their age, gender, academic discipline, prior education and exam performance were gathered.…

Our claim is that semantic metadata are required to allow a real reusing and assembling of learning objects. Our system is based on three models used to describe the domain, learners, and learning objects. The learning object model is inspired from knowledge representation proposals. A learning object can be reused directly or can be combined with…

The article discusses learning as embedded processes of development and aging, and as social activity over the life course. The concept of life-span learning is proposed and outlined to discuss these processes as aspects of and propositions in life-span development and aging theory. Life-span learning processes arise and continuously develop in a…

Academic advisors help students with the process of decision making, of making sense of their world, of understanding how they go about learning, and of understanding how to appreciate diversity in their world. If advisors are to help students in these areas, academic advisors should be aware of the cognitive processes of how they make sense of…

The paper aims to identify a solution to the dilemma that currently exists within the paradigm of strategic learning: the dilemma of whether a strategy should be seen as an action dependent on the specific knowledge of an educational actor--strategic knowledge--or whether it is dependent on a planned instructional context--strategic context. This…

Recently, more students have entered Dutch higher education. This is a consequence of the possibility to offer students to enter higher education, with a certificate from senior secondary education (SSVE). In earlier days most students in higher education had passed senior general secondary education (SGSE), or even pre-university education. It is…

This paper examines the nature of learning cultures in English Further Education (FE), as revealed in the Transforming Learning Cultures in FE (TLC) research project. In it, we describe four characteristics of a generic FE learning culture: the significance of learning cultures in every site; the significance of the tutor in influencing site…

From its inception, the Transforming Learning Cultures in Further Education (TLC) project included an explicit intention to identify some principles for the enhancement of learning cultures in order to improve student and teacher learning, and a wish to see how effective different strategies could be in this endeavour. The project showed that both…

This study explores how teachers experience an online course designed to provide a situated approach to developing understanding of online learning. It describes how the course designer aimed to exploit the potentials of online tasks and interactions in relation to a rationale for situated teacher development, and then explores evidence of how…

This paper explores the prescriptive, distancing and separating qualities that exist in Western systems of knowledge production. It examines scientific language and how discrimination takes place in the university setting and explores the ways in which academic knowledge production affects the learning experiences, participation and completion…

This digest contrasts the traditional view of learning characteristic of classroom instruction with the emerging "constructivist" view that emphasizes the understanding of how and why students learn. The latter takes learning as a knowledge construction process that closely relates to prior knowledge and the learning context. It lends…

In library instruction, as in any instructional setting, individual learning styles should be addressed to ensure better learning and retention. Historical examination of learning styles research suggests that in order to appreciate the diversity of students' learning styles and to apply this understanding in a library or information environment,…

The skills of knowing how to learn and apply information, which have been collectively grouped under the heading "learning management," are becoming increasingly important as society progresses farther into the information age. Because adult learning is usually more self-directed and because adults are largely free to determine their…

Questions and questioning play a major role in both formal and informal educative processes. They are the means by which a child expresses the desire to understand the world outside and they subsequently become the means by which a teacher assesses whether or not a child has satisfactorily assimilated something. This book considers questions from…

An internal cognitive variable--mental imagery representation--was studied using a set of three information-processing strategies under external stimulus visual display conditions for various learning levels. The copy strategy provided verbal and visual dual-coding and required formation of a vivid mental image. The relational strategy combined…