America is a knowledge-based society. But the knowledge business has a problem. It does not know enough. When General Electric or Microsoft has a problem, it spends several percent of its revenues--perhaps billions of dollars--on research and development. It does so despite enormous demands on the resources that drive its profits. Historically, as…

This chapter explores the dynamics and processes of peer group influences in learning settings from a social constructivist perspective. A two-tiered model of peer influences is presented, in which environments for learning are linked with mechanisms and processes most likely to underpin student learning. A distinction is drawn between more…

Young learners need activities that engage them mentally and physically in processing new information. It is easy to accept such ideas intuitively, but matching the curriculum content to meaningful activities is a challenge. The authors believe that following a learning cycle is a satisfactory way to meet that challenge. A learning cycle is a…

Simple examples are really encouraging in the understanding of rearrangements of infinite series, since many texts and teachers provide only existence theorems. In the absence of examples, an existence theorem is just a statement and lends little confidence to understanding. Iterated sums of double series seem to have a similar spirit of…

This article suggests that the notion of an educational "trading zone" is an analytically helpful way of describing a space in which ideas about learning and teaching are shared within and between disciplines. Drawing on our knowledge of anthropology and the Humanities, we suggest three possible reasons for the limited development of…

This paper describes an approach called opportunity centred learning that has been developed by the author and applied in the field of enterprise education. The relationship between opportunity centred learning and existing theory and practice in learning and education is outlined in comparison with problem-based learning and action learning, and…

This article summarises the findings from an evaluation of a Media Literacy course at the University of Barcelona. It focuses on some aspects of Self-Regulation and on the learning environment used by students. The students' learning processes were embedded in an eLearning project, in which students analysed the representation of immigrants and…

The purpose of this paper was to explore the concept of interest, one of the critical positive emotions in learning contexts and to investigate the effects of different types of visual illustrations on learning interest, achievement, and motivation in multimedia learning. The concept of interest was explored in light of positive emotion; an…

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…

The Languages Review Consultation Report recommends exploiting the potential of communications technology for the enhancement of curricular offerings. Newly developed instructional software is credited with opening doors to the cultures of young people while serving as an infinitely patient and supportive tutor. Thus, in the UK as in the US,…

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…

Influenced by Freinet, Freire, and Sherover-Marcuse, the author describes the evolution of her pedagogy, including a demystifying and empowering approach to working with graduate students in the dissertation process. Alma Flor Ada's educational philosophy and praxis, grounded in critical pedagogy and transformative education, developed in the…

Background: Research has shown that motivation is a key factor in the learning process as well as in school achievement. In essence, a number of researchers have highlighted the close link between motivation and achievement-related behaviours such as effort. Aims: The present study aims to acquire more specific information concerning the relations…

In this article, we explore an interactive learning process in a digital forum that focused on personal cases drawn from student teachers' classroom experience. To this end, we combined theoretical and methodological frameworks of knowledge-based and discourse-analytic perspectives that enabled us to uncover evidence showing what the students may…

Across the U.S., teachers are encountering students who are in the process of learning English as a second language. In the past two decades, this student population, known as English-language learners (ELLs), has more than doubled. Because of the linguistic demands of social studies content, ELLs may have particular difficulty understanding this…