This commentary addresses the analysis in Persson's (2012a) article. According to the authors, the agenda for change amongst scholars has four productive proposals. These are: (1) that scholars should broaden their disciplinary outlook beyond psychology and education; (2) that they should eschew policy borrowing; (3) that they should clarify, for…

To argue for the importance of an integrative approach to learning in introductory STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and other courses, we present a case study of a project incorporating cross-curricular skills in a college algebra course. We analyze student work on the project and responses to surveys, and find the…

Critical thinking is a graduate attribute that many courses, including engineering courses, claim to produce in students. As a graduate attribute it is seen by academics as a particularly desirable outcome of student learning and is said by researchers to be a defining characteristic of university education. However, how critical thinking is…

The randomized trial is the gold standard in scientific research and is used by several fields to study the effects of media. Although useful for studying the immediate response to media exposure, the experimental approach is not well suited to studying long-term effects or behavior outside the laboratory. The "natural experiment" approach, a…

Background: This study investigated the experiences and perceptions of operational members of Victoria Police in relation to their contacts with people with intellectual disability (ID). Key interests for exploration included how frequently and in what context police reported coming into contact with people with ID, how they made this…

This article looks at how arts integration can boost the language development of limited English proficient students in kindergarten through second grade. I first review existing research on how young children learn and describe the special challenges faced by children who must learn in an unfamiliar language. I then identify arts-based mechanisms…

This article analyses child development "as text" to highlight newly emerging contemporary tropes of northern, normalized childhoods in relation to gender, racialization and familial organization. A recent UK marketing campaign for the washing powder Persil is analysed for the ways it mobilizes discourses of childhood and child rights.…

Theories of student learning and development are particularly important in leadership education because they make prescriptions about how people can adopt increasingly complex ways of being, knowing, and doing--essential forms of development for leadership learning. Increasingly, there is a call for leadership educators to adopt interdisciplinary…

This paper draws on the theory of Basil Bernstein and on more recent applications of it by Rob Moore, John Beck and Michael Young to respond to recent calls for the replacement of discipline-based university faculties and departments with "problem-based" curricula and programmes of study. It considers, particularly, the potential…

In an ever-changing world, foreign language instruction remains faithfully devoted to teaching by means of coursebooks, the design of which is based mainly on the skills or the structural syllabus paradigm that arranges language according to complexity of grammatical phenomena. In this paper, I aim to explore the appropriateness of the materials…

Henry A. Giroux is well known for pushing the definitions of education. From his early forays into what has been termed the "New Sociology of Education" in the early 1980s to his more recent discussions of "public pedagogy", Giroux has methodically challenged existing orthodoxies. This essay will focus on the interdisciplinary broadening of…

Participating in cross-disciplinary collaborative activities can pose a range of challenges for those involved therein. Typically disciplinary strongholds are entrenched, and collaboration is dependent on the building of relationships--relationships that can exist in tension as issues of power, identity and the trappings of academic status inhibit…

This paper examines the representation of rural education research orientations--defined in terms of methodological approach, academic focus and place-consciousness--within the literature and across academic disciplines. A content analysis of 155 abstracts from articles published in the Journal of Research in Rural Education and Rural Sociology…

Educational neuroscience promises to incorporate emerging insights from neuroscience into education, and is an exiting renovation of cognitive science in education. But unlike cognitive neuroscience--which aims to explain how the mind is embodied--educational neuroscience necessarily incorporates values that reflect the kind of citizen and the…

The starting hypothesis of the keynote article (KA) is that language acquisition plays an essential role in processes leading to grammatical change. Consequently, a minimal requirement, to be met by explanations of diachronic change is that they rely on mechanisms which are operative in acquisition. The KA is therefore an appeal for…