Interactive immersive entertainment, or videogame playing, has emerged as a major entertainment and educational medium. As research and development initiatives proliferate, educational researchers might benefit by developing more grounded theories about them. This article argues for framing game play as a "designed experience." Players'…

Government grant-funding agencies have spawned an explosion of images from historical collections on the Internet. They have encouraged collaborative projects in which institutions share resources for capital-intensive digitization projects. These Web "exhibits" are neither publications nor exhibits in the traditional sense, most often without…

This paper examines one model of professional development, the use of video clubs in which groups of teachers watch and discuss videotapes of their classrooms. Specifically, the paper investigates the learning that occurred as four middle-school mathematics teachers participated in a year-long series of video club meetings. Over time, discourse in…

One pressing issue that students in the new millennium must know more about is the uneasy bilateral relationship between the United States and Japan. In this study, I examined how 33 teachers from 21 schools, who participated in the "Japan Today" Program, taught about Japan, continued teaching about Japan after a one-year commitment,…

The recruitment of respondents belonging to ethnic minorities poses important challenges in social and health research. This paper reflects on the enablers and barriers to recruitment that we encountered in our research work with persons belonging to ethnic minorities. Additionally, we applied the Matching Model of Recruitment, a theoretical…

Background: It is critical to understand the contextual factors in schools that influence teaching behaviours and student learning outcomes. This study uses a contextual framework with four domain areas (personal, instructional, institutional, and societal) to take an in-depth look at urban/inner-city teachers' context and the enacted curriculum.…

Although Vygotskian principles involving the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) are hailed as tenets undergirding teaching and learning within a constructivist setting, these principals have not been implemented widely within school classrooms. Tharp and Gallimore, building on the notion that learning can be maximized when a teacher has a…

The study of delinquency has focused on examining the relative predictive value of school, parent, and peer contextual variables, but relatively little research has included Chinese and Southeast Asian youth. Using data from a larger, community-based research study with 329 Chinese, Cambodian, Laotian or Mien, and Vietnamese youth, the authors…

This paper argues that constructivism is a needed educational reform that will succeed only when three types of readiness are in place: teacher, curricular, and societal. The failure of constructivism and other reform movements can be attributed to the fact that these three forms of readiness were never in alignment. The author contends that…

The purpose of this study was to investigate predictors of early writing for low-income, urban students. Drawing on research and theory characterizing literacy development as a complex, integrative process, the author analyzed growth in the descriptive writing of students in Grades 1-3. The participants were 309 low-income children enrolled in 16…

Share's "self-teaching" model proposes that readers acquire most knowledge about the orthographic structure of words incidentally while reading independently. In the current study, the self-teaching hypothesis was tested by simulating everyday reading through the use of real words, analyzing the effects of context, and considering the independent…

This paper examines the mediating role of students' goals in group work at university. Research on cooperative and collaborative learning has provided empirical support for the cognitive, motivational and social benefits of group work but the antecedents of motivation and ongoing management of emerging motivational and socio-emotional issues have…

This article considers the ways in which educators and learning societies in Zambia and Zimbabwe have had to struggle to create independent, democratic and critical curricula in difficult circumstances over the last 50 years in the context of historical shifts in power, a declining British Empire and the re-emergence of reactionary forces at a…

Peer- and teacher-reported prosocial behavior of 339 6th-grade (11-12 years) and 8th-grade (13-14 years) students was examined in relation to prosocial goals, self-processes (reasons for behavior, empathy, perspective taking, depressive affect, perceived competence), and contextual cues (expectations of peers and teachers). Goal pursuit…

In this article we contrast two distance foreign language programs developed at two European institutions of higher education (the Modern Languages Program at the Open University, UK; and the English Program at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Spain) as instances of two pedagogical models used to address the many challenges posed by teaching…