This paper analyses the role of computers within the nursery sector and what are viewed as the potential benefits and concerns of introducing young children to computers. It also examines how the computer is introduced and presented to young children and the form it takes. Data collection comprises a number of methods: questionnaires,…

This article considers the notion of difference as we experience it in our daily lives, and specifically, within the classroom between pupils and teachers. Drawing on research and work with schools in the south of England, the paper describes how the Working with Others Unit at the University of Brighton has developed a practical process approach…

Typically, guidelines for design of interactive multimedia systems have been based on intuitive beliefs of designers rather than being founded on relevant research and theory. As advances in technology create new opportunities for education, it is important to use a range of theoretical perspectives to optimize use of new technology in teaching…

Seeking to strengthen preparation of preservice general educators for the realities of inclusive school settings, two special education teacher educators from different universities used content-based structured reflective log writing as an integral course requirement. Faced with teaching intensive course content within a limited time frame, the…

The idea of learning through projects has a long history in the field of education in general, and in early childhood education in particular. Many educators provide guidelines on how to approach project work with children and assert its benefits in various areas of children's learning and development. Yet few empirical studies investigate what…

This article examines maternal everyday teaching strategies in Chinese, American, Hutterite, and Native American cultural communities. It moves beyond a theoretical framework based on distancing by suggesting that effective adult teaching strategies are contextually and culturally determined. The authors urge early childhood educators to make…

A socio-constructivist and experiential process for climate change education was experimented within two coastal communities of Eastern Canada with 39 students 13 and 14 years of age. The pedagogical process, based on local observation of climate change, Duit's conceptual change theory (1999) and experiential learning, aimed for the improvement of…

Traditional continuing medical education (CME) has been disconnected from the actual practice of medicine and has not focused on providing the most useful information in the most efficient way. Physicians have different information needs at different times. When asked at the end of a day of patient care, physicians will typically report having had…

One of the factors affecting students' learning in science is their existing knowledge prior to instruction. The students' prior knowledge provides an indication of the alternative conceptions as well as the scientific conceptions possessed by the students. This study is concerned primarily with students' alternative conceptions and with…

How do international speakers of English assert their identities as legitimate teachers of English given the privileged position of the native speaker? To answer this question, we present case studies of two students from Taiwan in their first year of study in a 2-year master of arts in TESOL (MATESOL) program. The data included interviews after…

Assessment theorists and academics alike espouse the importance of feedback on performance assessment tasks for supporting improvement and progress in student learning achievement. Despite these espoused ideals, students claim a lack of adequate, timely feedback and their teachers claim that students fail to heed the advice given. This paper…

Limited research on ESL learners' use of vocabulary in writing prompted our investigation of vocabulary use in composition by secondary school multi-L1 intermediate ESL learners in Greater Vancouver (n = 48). This study showed that though intermediate learners' use of 1,000-2,000-word-level vocabulary tended to remain constant, their productive…

English as a second language (ESL) teachers have long noted that native speakers of Arabic exhibit exceptional difficulty with English reading comprehension (e.g., Thompson-Panos & Thomas-Ruzic, 1983). Most existing work in this area has looked to higher level aspects of reading such as familiarity with discourse structure and cultural knowledge…

A nationwide random sample of 179 secondary general education math and special education teachers completed a survey asking them about their use of specific instructional practices to help teach math to students with learning disabilities (LD) and emotional/behavioral disorders (EB/D) and their use of specific assessment accommodations with these…

Teaching culture in the foreign language (L2) classroom can be a real dilemma for instructors: What culture do we teach? What does it mean to learn about a culture? How can students learn culture? In order to answer these questions, we evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of two types of culture portfolios: a traditional one that used on-line…