Since the 1980s, educators in adult basic education and special education have speculated that a substantial if unknown percentage of adults have specific learning disabilities (LDs) and have sought to identify and address effectively the needs of these learners. Two rarely intersecting bodies of historical literature on LDs provide the background…

Policy makers have advanced out-of-school time learning as a means to address far-reaching class and racial/ethnic disparities in high school achievement and college readiness, particularly in urban districts. However, limited data have hindered large-scale efforts to evaluate the influence of such activities on student achievement. Recent federal…

This paper introduces some of the debates in the field of critical thinking by highlighting differences among thinkers such as Siegel, Ennis, Paul, McPeck, and Martin, and poses some questions that arise from these debates. Does rationality transcend particular cultures, or are there different kinds of thinking, different styles of reasoning? What…

Students are rarely presented with a diversity of viewpoints about evolution and its mechanisms. The historical background to evolution normally suffices: Darwin's journey on The Beagle, his concepts of natural selection and common descent, and an outline of Mendel's experiments. With supplementary concepts such as ecological niches and the modes…

Public debates about socioscientific issues are increasingly prevalent, but the public response to messages about, for example, climate change, does not always seem to match the seriousness of the problem identified by scientists. Is there anything unique about appeals based on scientific evidence--do people evaluate science and nonscience…

The work of Students Informing Now (S.I.N.), an immigrant student organization at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is described in this column. The authors argue that S.I.N.'s diverse activities and textual products construct a counternarrative that challenges and reframes the debate on undocumented students and immigration. Focusing on…

This study aims to provide a perspective which allows honorifics to be seen beyond the frame of politeness and/or formality in social structures. Korean school grammar explains honorifics as linguistic forms that reflect relative social positional difference (e.g., K-H. Lee, 2010), and has assumed that social structure and language use have a…

In this article I contend that we cannot divorce affirmative action from issues about race and racism. Further, debates on affirmative action have to acknowledge the power of words/concepts/definitions and how they can be constructed and used for the purposes of domination or liberation. I argue that, in debating affirmative action, we have to…

In 1839 the first normal school in the United States opened in Lexington, Massachusetts. Heralded as "an instrument of great good" (Everett 1863, 769) and a spring in which was coiled "a vigor whose uncoiling may wheel the spheres" (Ogren 2005, 16), normal schools continued to grow in numbers throughout the nineteenth century and produced…

The increasing ubiquity of PowerPoint in the university classroom raises complex questions about pedagogy and the creation of dynamic and effective learning environments. Though much of the sociological teaching literature has focused on engagement and active learning, very little of this work has addressed the presence of PowerPoint in sociology…

This study concerns itself with the conflict in mathematics education--popularly known as "math wars"--in the United States. More specifically, it investigates the "terms of debate" in this conflict to develop insights into the varied, and sometimes conflicting, relationships between the perceived nature of mathematics and its…

In "Moderating the Debate: Rationality and the Promise of American Education", Michael Feuer argues that insights from cognitive science and the theory of bounded rationality can help us understand why educational policy makers overreach in seeking optimal solutions to educational problems. In this essay, Emily Robertson argues that cognitive…

The characteristics of the Russian intelligentsia, and even its definition, have been debated since the nineteenth century and continue to be a source of disagreement in Putin's Russia. The array of problems relating to the intelligentsia continues to be an inseparable element of ideas about historical experience and its fate that, in conjunction…

Essentialist representations of the Orientalised Other abound within the literature of intercultural communication. The dominant discourse constructs Chinese-speaking students as members of a homogenised collective: passive recipients of knowledge who are reliant on a reproductive approach to learning. This article seeks to offer a corrective to…

The rapid development of computer-supported collaborative environments has highlighted the need for collaborative knowledge construction devices. Because most available mindtools do not promote collaboration, there is a need for social mindtools that can be used in collaborative learning situations. We have used activity theory as a conceptual…