We analyze the results of a study conducted for the purpose of assessing the viability of an alternative starting point for teaching fractions. The alternative is based on Freudenthal's insights about fraction as comparison. It involves portraying the entities that unit fractions quantify as always being apart from the reference unit, instead of…

Support from teachers is a key strategy for accommodating students with Asperger syndrome (AS) diagnosis in the mainstream classroom. Teachers' understanding and expectations of students, i.e. their social representations (SR), have a bearing on how they interact and accommodate, but little is known about why. Therefore, the current study examined…

In this paper we investigate how the bodily activity of teaching, along with the embodied aspect of lived experience, relates to science teachers' ways of dealing with bodies as living organisms which are both the subject matter as well as the site or vehicle of learning. More precisely, the following questions are pursued: (1) "In what ways…

Expository texts contain rhetorical devices that help readers to connect text ideas (within a text and with prior knowledge) and to monitor reading. Rhetorical competence addresses readers' skill in detecting, understanding and using these devices. We examined the contribution of rhetorical competence to reading comprehension on two groups of 11-…

This study clarifies the basic structure of student teachers' reflective thinking. It presents a constructivist account of teacher knowledge through a detailed analysis of various patterns of reflection in student teacher portfolios. We aim to gain a greater understanding of the process and outcomes of portfolio writing in the context of teaching…

The purpose of this paper was to examine differences between undergraduate students who had multiple exposures to an assessment of moral reasoning development (DIT-2) and students of the same cohort who had fewer exposures to the same assessment. Controlling for a host of individual covariates, the analysis determined that students who took the…

Video games are pervasive in today's culture, and the time kids spend playing them may seem, from a teacher's perspective, as time that is lost to education. Sometimes, sadly, this is true. But many good video games, although not explicitly educational in focus, provide powerful experiences that are rich fodder for subsequent instruction. Looking…

The Calculus Concept Readiness (CCR) instrument assesses foundational understandings and reasoning abilities that have been documented to be essential for learning calculus. The CCR Taxonomy describes the understandings and reasoning abilities assessed by CCR. The CCR is a 25-item multiple-choice instrument that can be used as a placement test for…

Tutorial dialogue systems often simulate tactics used by experienced human tutors such as restating students' dialogue input. We investigated whether the amount of tutor restatement that supports student inference interacts with students' incoming knowledge level in predicting how much students learn from a system. We found that students with…

Although restating part of a student's correct response correlates with learning and various types of restatements have been incorporated into tutorial dialogue systems, this tactic has not been tested in isolation to determine if it causally contributes to learning. When we explored the effect of tutor restatements that support inference on…

When learning a third language (L3), learners, according to researchers, generally rely on a variety of resources, such as their L1 (first language), L2 (second language), and/or their current knowledge of the L3. Although studies have identified a number of factors that may influence a learner's choice of the source of transfer, these works were…

This paper presents findings from the large-scale study "Literacy Teacher Educators: Their Backgrounds, Visions, and Practices" that includes 28 literacy/English teacher educators (LTEs) from four countries. The participants were interviewed three times and shared their course outlines. Six pre-service LTEs who use a constructivist…

Introduction: This study concerns students' criteria in the evaluation of Internet sources for a school assignment requiring reflections on a controversial issue. The findings are elaborated by analysing students' discursive accounts in justifying the use or non-use of sources. Method: The interview data was collected in a Finnish upper secondary…

Factors influencing the adoption and acceptance of tablets as a mobile technology were explored one year after their integration in middle schools in Palestine. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 teachers. The participants held a variety of attitudes toward accepting mobile technologies in their instruction. The findings revealed…

The term "modality effect" in multimedia learning means that students learn better from pictures combined with spoken rather than written text. The most prominent explanations refer to the split attention between visual text reading and picture observation which could affect transfer of information into working memory, maintenance of…