Carol Twigg, president of the National Center for Academics Transformation and a secondary school teacher, debates on whether technology in the classroom improves student learning. She claims that the key to increasing student learning is to get students more engaged in what they are studying.

Wouldn't your job be easier if students were just more interested in learning? Now, here's a book that will open your eyes to where the desire to learn actually comes from and what teachers can really do to activate it. Using stories from classroom teachers, counselors, administrators, and students, Bob Sullo explains why the desire to learn is…

The study investigates the effect of length of meditation history on various factors, namely learning motivation, learning outcome and classroom climate. Data were collected from working adult learners (n = 450) attending meditation classes in two large cities in Taiwan. The investigation categorized learners based on meditation experience, namely…

Background: Self-handicapping is an attribution-related process whereby individuals create performance impediments/excuses to protect self-worth in socially evaluative environments. Thus, the prevailing motivational climate would appear to be an important factor when attempting to understand the situational self-handicapping process within school…

Zoos and aquariums have shifted their focus over recent years, taking a much more active role in wildlife conservation and in promoting conservation learning among their visitors. Research in these settings provides a valuable foundation for the emerging field of non-captive wildlife tourism. In particular, valuable lessons regarding the potential…

The specific character of border troops' performance of their operational and service tasks at border security posts and "hot spots" makes it necessary to analyze in depth and study the problems of how to improve the training of graduates and how to motivate the cadets enrolled in higher educational institutions of Russia's Federal…

This paper reports a research study into the effects of rich, sustained visual arts instruction on 103 inner city 9-year-olds in two major US cities. We use the lenses of social learning theory, theories of motivation and self-efficacy, and recent research on artistic thinking to investigate the programs' effects on children's self-beliefs and…

This paper offers findings intended to shed light on the determinants and consequences of college students' willingness to work hard. Self-report survey data from a sample of 1296 undergraduates revealed that (1) students expended significantly different amounts of effort across four pairs of study contexts (e.g., courses where they connected with…

Student motivation as well as student perception of interpersonal teacher behaviour are linked to the sense of wellbeing at student level. However, while most of the variance in the measurement of student wellbeing was situated at student level, eleven percent of variance was found at classroom level. In this article we focus on this variance at…

This study aimed at exploring motivational factors among American college and university students studying Japanese (as a second/foreign) language by examining their Peak Learning Experiences (Anderson et al., 2001; Bloom, 1982). In all, 128 students studying intermediate Japanese at five different schools returned their answers to this study's…

This work addresses the subject of mathematics education at secondary schools from a current and stimulating point of view intimately related to computational science. Cryptology is a captivating way of introducing into the classroom different mathematical subjects such as functions, matrices, modular arithmetic, combinatorics, equations,…

Teacher educators may need to pay attention to pre-service elementary teachers' motivation to learn mathematics in order to help them develop a deep level of understanding from their mathematics content courses for teachers (content courses) and to help them develop the disposition to learn mathematics throughout their careers. In this…

Student wellbeing can be considered a major output indicator of quality of education. A positive classroom climate can contribute to a higher sense of wellbeing. Interpersonal relationships between teachers and students are an important aspect of the classroom climate. This study investigated how student wellbeing was predicted by student…

In most developed countries, the pursuit of reliable and valid means of assessing people's learning generates high volumes of published discourse and, not infrequently, dissent; the documentation on the various assessment policies, practices and theories could conceivably fill whole libraries. Some of the discourse and much of the dissent relate…

This article presents a checklist that teachers and other education professionals can use when deciding which instructional materials to include in their content area instruction. The checklist addresses several considerations, such as the learners' prior knowledge, vocabulary levels, and motivation. In addition, characteristics of the text…