This research suggests that learning biology in an outdoor environment has a positive cognitive and affective impact on 13-15-year-old, Swedish high school pupils. Eighty-five pupils in four classes participated in a quasi-experimental design. Half the pupils, taking a biology course in ecology or diversity of life, had several lessons outdoors…

Writing researchers have suggested that students who are perceived as strong writers (i.e., those who generate texts rated as high quality) demonstrate flexibility in their writing style. While anecdotally this has been a commonly held belief among researchers and educators, there is little empirical research to support this claim. This study…

Educators advocate that science education can help the development of more responsible worldviews when students learn not only scientific concepts, but also about science, or "nature of science". Cosmology can help the formation of worldviews because this topic is embedded in socio-cultural and religious issues. Indeed, during the Cold…

This paper reports on efforts by three Australian academics to develop students' sociocultural awareness (in particular, their racial literacy) during a time of mounting pressure on teacher educators to narrow and standardise their approaches. The field of health education provides a vehicle for research; however, it is not the paper's central…

Discourse connectives (DCs) are multi-functional devices used to connect discourse segments and fulfill interpersonal levels of discourse. This study investigates the use of selected 80 DCs within 11 categories in the argumentative essays produced by L1 and L2 university students. The analysis is based on the International Corpus Network of Asian…

While thinking critically is often perceived to be the primary purpose of reading, the question of whether it can actually be taught in classrooms has been extensively debated. This paper bases itself on a qualitative case study of university students completing a degree in English Language and Literature. It explores the way in which critical…

Writing researchers have suggested that students who are perceived as strong writers (i.e., those who generate texts rated as high quality) demonstrate flexibility in their writing style. While anecdotally this has been a commonly held belief among researchers and educators, there is little empirical research to support this claim. This study…

Is learning about culture important when learning a foreign language? One would think that after its long history in the field of foreign language teaching this question had been answered with a resounding "yes". However, I saw little evidence of this in the classroom when I returned to the university to learn a foreign language or when…

This study reports on the results of classroom research investigating the effects of corpus use in the process of revising compositions in English as a foreign language. Our primary aim was to investigate the relationship between the information extracted from corpus data and how that information actually helped in revising different types of…

This article examines gender representations of family and parental roles among young people aged 11 to 14 years. It is based on the qualitative analysis of 792 essays written by Portuguese girls and boys attending compulsory education. The adolescents' texts express normative images and cultural representations about gender that are plural and…

Providing feedback on draft essays is an accepted means of enacting a social-constructivist approach to assessment, aligning with current views on the value of formative feedback and assessment for learning (AFL). However, the use of this process as a means of improving not only content but also students' academic writing skills has not been…

Many universities have instituted global education programs to prepare their students for the demands of living in a global society; yet, little information exists about the effectiveness of these programs from the participants' perspectives. At the local level, a liberal arts university has not undertaken an assessment of its global learning…

Teaching students to write standard arguments in history classes is certainly worthwhile; teaching them to write historical arguments is even more so. Learning historical writing is something that a range of students can do. But what does it mean to write a good history essay and what might students' attempts to do so look like? Here, the author…

Lori Horvitz's book contains 26 essays from queer students and educators exploring how sexuality can affect classroom dynamics. Although the book's title references lesbians, it also encompasses bisexuals and highlights friendships between gays and lesbians. In addition, many of the essays discuss social justice initiatives as well as illustrate…

AIDS, from the beginning, has been a mnemonic pandemic. Remembering and forgetting have reflected and constituted the vicissitudes of HIV/AIDS, its inventions, significations, and transformations in and across time, then and now and into the welter, promise and pitfall, of future and futurity. The 25th anniversary of AIDS Coalition to Unleash…