The purpose of this study was to examine the impact that two instructional approaches to teaching rugby had on students' learning, enjoyment and affect. Fifty-three boys (aged 12-13) from a large metropolitan private boy's school in eastern Australia participated in either a 20 lesson unit of rugby union taught using a skill-drill-game approach (n…

Background: Individual differences in depressive symptoms have been linked with social skill deficits in adults and children, yet empirical studies on adolescents are lacking. The present research examines age and gender differences in nonverbal behaviour between mildly depressed and nondepressed (pre-) adolescents during conversations with an…

Background: Little is known about the predictive validity of hyperkinetic disorder (HKD) as defined by the Diagnostic Criteria for Research for mental and behavioral disorders of the tenth edition of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10; World Health Organization, 1993), particularly when the diagnosis is given to younger children.…

Background: Prisoners' children appear to suffer profound psychosocial difficulties during their parents' imprisonment. However, no previous study has examined later-life outcomes for prisoners' children compared to children separated from parents for other reasons. We hypothesise that parental imprisonment predicts boys' antisocial and delinquent…

Background: Some research findings have suggested that group day-care may be associated with an increased risk for physical aggression. Methods: Cross-sectional maternal questionnaire data from a representative sample of 3431 Canadian 2- to 3-year-olds were used to compare rates of physical aggression shown by children looked after by their own…

The article outlines the technical writing tutorial (TWT) that preceded an advanced ESL writing course for students of English Philology at the Jagiellonian University. Having assessed the English skills of those students at the end of the semester, we found a statistically significant increase in the performance of the students who had taken the…

This article reports the validity and use of a new form of the Constructivist Learning Environment Survey (CLES). As part of a larger study, a comparative student version (CLES-CS) was developed to evaluate the impact of an innovative teacher development program (based on the Integrated Science Learning Environment, ISLE, model) in school…

This paper reviews the recent literature on cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevalence, CVD-related mortality, physiological CVD risk factors, and behavioral CVD risk factors in adults with mental retardation (MR). The literature on the potential influences of modifiable behavioral CVD risk factors and the physiological CVD risk factors are also…

College teachers have done an excellent job over the years of teaching technical concepts, but they may not have done as good a job of teaching their adult students to be a good problem-solvers. Nine representatives from the technical industry and academia were interviewed in this study for their expert opinions on the subject of teaching…

I examine how midlife women, who came of age in the 1950s, compare their career accomplishments with those of their young adult daughters who came of age in the 1970s. Analyses are based on quantitative and qualitative data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, which has tracked a sample of adults since their high school graduation in 1957.…

ICT curriculum integration is the apparent goal of an extensive array of ICT initiatives in all Australian states and territories. However, the reported impact of ICT use by teachers on learning and teaching is by no means consistent. Explanations offered for this in the literature include the influence of teacher confidence and expertise, and…

The notion of language dominance is often defined in terms of proficiency. We distinguish dominance, as a property of the bilingual mind and a concept of language knowledge, from proficiency, as a concept of language use. We discuss ways in which language dominance may be assessed, with a focus on measures of mean length of utterance (MLU).…

Six children (5 boys, 1 girl; aged 36-60 months) participated in this qualitative study. Each child was enrolled in a different family child care facility. The authors rated the child care providers in 3 of the facilities as using developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) most of the time and rated the providers in the 3 other facilities as…

This study used a diagnostic testing approach to compare the mathematics achievement of eighth-grade students across a sample of 20 countries, analyzing data from the Third International Math and Science Study-Revised (TIMSS-R, 1999). Using the rule-space method, student mastery was measured on 23 specific content knowledge and processing…

This article describes two studies that examined the effects of pictorial and written annotations on second language (L2) vocabulary learning from a multimedia environment. In both studies, students were randomly assigned to one of four aural multimedia groups: a control group that received no annotations, and three treatment groups that provided…