The advance of online technology and instructional delivery such as Web-based learning (WBL) has heralded new changes in education. Students using the WBL environment in various courses at eight universities in Malaysia were surveyed. Results showed that five main factors influence the effectiveness of the online learning process: students'…

When the author was a little girl, her father told her the story of how he once saw the great Harry Houdini escape from a straight jacket. In the early 1900s, Houdini fascinated thousands of people by performing feats of life-threatening daring and agility. Houdini was a professional in the traditional sense: he acted alone, kept his trade secrets…

Following prolonged discussion, the Austrian government has passed a new University Act which will provide universities with a semiautonomous status. The reform is the most incisive change of the university system for the past 150 years and has been preceded by an equally momentous change in the status of the teaching faculty and staff, all future…

The National Education Development Project (NEDP) is one of the most important attempts to improve the quality of teacher education in Turkey. NEDP focused on the development of practice in pre-service secondary school language teacher education in Turkey. NEDP supported this research to explore student, mentor, teacher educator, and mentor…

For centuries traditional university education has primarily focused on building foundational skills in particular disciplines via the transfer of knowledge from instructor to student. Today however, simply being able to reproduce knowledge is no longer adequate; students must also be able to apply their knowledge to changing, real world contexts.…

Electronic delivery of courses presents an evolving process and one that necessitates a change in the architecture of learning designs. Moving beyond the adaptation of familiar methodology for electronic delivery is challenging and requires innovation. The inclusion of interactive courseware in an electronically delivered course addresses varied…

This article presents findings from a 4-year study of 13 culturally and linguistically diverse elementary schools implementing comprehensive school reform (CSR) models. The study focused on: (a) the actions at the state and district levels that facilitated or inhibited reform implementation; (b) the adaptability of the various reforms in…

Reflection and professional development are two key practices that characterize an effective teacher and that are frequently overlooked in preservice training (Bowles, 2003; Halen-Faber, 1997; Patrick & Reinhartz, 1999). Reflection can be defined as the type of thinking that serves to challenge notions of prior learning (Halen-Faber, 1997), and…

This paper presents a review of recent research that examines the relative instructional utility of text-based synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC). As a mechanism for limiting the number of studies reviewed as well as controlling for emergent technologies, only research published since 2000 was reviewed. The goal was…

The VITAE project is a four-year (2001-2005) research study, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills, conducted with 300 teachers in 100 schools in seven local education authorities in England. The project aimed to identify factors that may affect their work and lives over time and how these factors may, in turn, impact on their…

As educators' awareness of their responsibilities towards ensuring the accessibility of the learning environment to disabled students increases, significant debate surrounds the implications of accessibility requirements on educational multimedia. There would appear to be widespread concern that the fundamental principles of creating accessible…

There has been little research on how a content-based teacher education course can embed effective training in the use of the World Wide Web to search for information and present learning outcomes. To address this gap, the present study documents the experience of 64 pre-service and in-service teachers who completed a web-based group project in an…

The article examines, through comparative case study method, how secondary-language-arts preservice student teachers' identities were constructed by spacetime configurations and what those identities meant to the individuals in the study. It reflects on the findings from two of the preservice secondary arts teachers for the study in two…

The "Commissioner of Education's Report on Violence, Vandalism and Substance Abuse in New Jersey Public Schools", submitted annually to the education committees of the Senate and Assembly, provides the Legislature with data in four broad incident categories: violence, vandalism, weapons, and substance abuse. This year's report highlights…

Inverness Research studied the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) Seminars on Science program for eight years, from its inception in 1998 to 2006. This paper presents teacher survey ratings for "Earth: Inside and Out", along with profiles of three teachers who took the course. Course takers report on the annual follow-up surveys…