At the Lisbon summit in 2000 the European Council set the strategic goal of becoming the most dynamic and competitive region in the world within 10 years. One of the responses of the Dutch government to this ambition is to invest in vocational education. Strengthening vocational education in the Netherlands must result in a second main route into…

The authors investigated how human adults encode and remember parts of multielement scenes composed of recursively embedded visual shape combinations. The authors found that shape combinations that are parts of larger configurations are less well remembered than shape combinations of the same kind that are not embedded. Combined with basic…

The article discusses a vast river of data or information and creating a context in which the information makes sense and can be understood. As technologists, they have this kind of awkward responsibility to deal with social context. In order to provide value to their organizations, they need to understand the messy activity of groups of people…

Computation can have a profound intellectual impact, like the alphabet thousands of years ago. Using computation, people can begin to outline cognitive structures that will revolutionize the way they learn, although, especially at universities, the dreams must sometimes lag behind their potential due to limited funding. Ultimately, however, the…

The basic tenet of constructivism is that learners construct their knowledge on their own by associating new with prior information. The significance of the learner's interaction with his/her social and physical environment is here of great importance; the learner is at the center of the learning process while the tutor is seen as a facilitator, a…

Drawing on a wide range of secondary and primary materials as well as personal experience of Albania dating from the 1970s to the present day, this paper describes and critically evaluates current geographical and environmental education in Albania in relation to three dimensions: (1) the changing nature of the curriculum over the past 20 years;…

This paper articulates a perspective on learning to discuss ways in which students develop personal sense and negotiate meaning in a middle school algebra context. Building on a sociocultural perspective that incorporates mental objects, learning is described as a mutually dependent process involving personal sense making and the public…

Despite the increasing importance of, and interest in, documenting the impact of environmental education programs on students' learning for sustainability, few tools are currently available to measure young students' environmental learning across all the dimensions of knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviours. This paper reports on the…

The issue of multi-level classrooms and of the increasingly differentiated nature of students' learning experiences continues to be a major challenge for language teachers. It's safe to say that wherever two or more language teachers are gathered together, the "problem" of multi-level classrooms will figure somewhere in the conversation.…

We investigated learning-related changes in amplitude, scalp topography, and source localization of the mismatch negativity (MMN), a neurophysiological response correlated with auditory discrimination ability. Participants (n = 32) underwent two EEG recordings while they watched silent films and ignored auditory stimuli. Stimuli were a standard…

Stress facilitates memory formation, but only when the stressor is closely linked to the learning context. These effects are, at least in part, mediated by corticosteroid hormones. Here we demonstrate that corticosterone rapidly facilitates synaptic potentiation in the mouse hippocampal CA1 area when high levels of the hormone and high-frequency…

Understanding the function of the distinct amygdaloid nuclei in learning comprises a major challenge. In the two studies described herein, we used c-Fos immunolabeling to compare the engagement of various nuclei of the amygdala in appetitive and aversive instrumental training procedures. In the first experiment, rats that had already acquired a…

Cannabinoid receptors type 1 (CB1) play a central role in both short-term and long-term extinction of auditory-cued fear memory. The molecular mechanisms underlying this function remain to be clarified. Several studies indicated extracellular signal-regulated kinases (ERKs), the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase with its downstream effector AKT, and…

At University High School, an alternative high school for students who failed in the Boston Public Schools system, everyone is learning to implement the more dynamic, socially conscious, and relevant way of learning by doing. Students, teachers, and staff are learning how to develop an educational philosophy and practice that is predicated on…

The aim of this study is to reveal the differences in the process of learning reading strategies by EFL learners whose English proficiency levels differ. For this purpose, portfolios made by 10 Japanese female college students learning English (five in the higher proficiency group and the other five in the lower) were analyzed. The results found…