In this article we argue that Kelly's construct psychology (Kelly 1955; 1966/2003) provides a useful framework for mentoring in the Higher Education sector in South Africa. Kelly's notion of constructive alternativism prompts practitioners to adopt a questioning attitude to life in HE; newly appointed academic staff members and their mentors have…

In this paper we present eTeacher, an intelligent agent that provides personalized assistance to e-learning students. eTeacher observes a student's behavior while he/she is taking online courses and automatically builds the student's profile. This profile comprises the student's learning style and information about the student's performance, such…

Structural equation modelling was used to test a model integrating achievement goal orientation, learning style, self-efficacy and metacognition into a single framework that explained and predicted variation in performance. Self-efficacy was the strongest predictor of performance. Metacognition was a weak predictor of performance. Deep processing…

The study aimed to investigate how students in an introductory educational sciences course experienced and understood their own actorship during the course, in relation to conditions for learning created by the teachers. The analyses were based on students' answers to an evaluation questionnaire that produced both quantitative and qualitative…

This study investigated the relationship between 3 ability-based cognitive styles (verbal deductive, spatial imagery, and object imagery) and performance on geometry problems that provided different types of clues. The purpose was to determine whether students with a specific cognitive style outperformed other students, when the geometry problems…

The teaching of mathematical modeling to undergraduate students requires that students are given ample opportunity to develop their own models and experience first-hand the process of model building. Finding an appropriate context within which modeling can be undertaken is not a simple task as it needs to be readily understandable and seen as…

More than five decades of research and development have focused on making the Creative Problem Solving process and tools accessible across a wide range of ages and contexts. Recent evidence indicates that when individuals, in both school and corporate settings, understand their own style of problem solving, they are able to learn and apply process…

The development of teaching in higher education towards a more learner-orientated model has been supported by the literature on individual learning differences and on learning styles in particular. This has contributed to the evolution of university pedagogy away from a medieval transmission model than runs counter to contemporary understanding of…

The learning landscape is changing quickly, and education institutions are hard-pressed to make sure their academic facilities are meeting the evolving needs of teachers and students. Within a universe of continual change, though, school facilities still need furniture. Furniture selection goes beyond color or size. Furniture must be flexible and…

Corrective feedback (CF) has been investigated in relation to learners' error types that trigger CF and learners' responses to CF. These research findings generally suggest that recasts, the most frequently used type of CF, did not trigger learners' reformulation of their erroneous utterances very frequently. In these studies, however, teachers'…

Based on the perspective of postformal operations, this study investigated whether college students' role models (technical teachers vs. lecturing teachers) and preferred learning styles (experience-driven mode vs. theory-driven mode) in collaborative teaching courses would be moderated by their cognitive development (absolute thinking vs.…

Constant and continued upgrade of skills and qualifications is imperative in a knowledge society (Davies, 1998; David and Foray, 2003), however identifying and using effective (maximise retention/recall) and efficient (minimise time to learn) learning practices is often a challenge. Spacing Effect is a robust phenomenon that suggests that the…

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships of learning style characteristics to self-directed learning propensity among adult learners. The learning style characteristics investigated were learning style balance as measured by a scoring method developed by Mainemelis, Boyatzis, and Kolb (2002) and learning style dimensions as…

The purpose of this study was to examine whether field-dependent/independent style awareness affects learning outcomes and learning strategies used in a hypermedia instructional module. Field-dependent/independent style was measured using the Global Embedded Figures Test. Style awareness meant that students were provided with information and…

The central place of the learning environment and the personal characteristics of the learner in influencing whether students adopt deep or surface approaches to learning is well evidenced in the literature (for example, Marton & Saljo, 1976; Biggs, 1987; Entwhistle, 2001; Ramsden, 2003). For this reason, tertiary educators are constantly…