The Australian Research Centre for Sex, Health and Society (2009) reported a rise in the number of students becoming sexually active at a younger age. Statistics show the rate of people contracting Sexually Transmitted Infections have increased in Australia, with reported numbers of Chlamydia quadrupling in the last ten years, with 80% of reported…

The present study reports the development of a theoretically motivated measure that provides estimates of a preschooler's ability to recall auditory text, to make text-based inferences, to access knowledge from long-term memory, and to integrate this accessed knowledge with new information from auditory text. This new preschooler component…

This paper reports the results of research conducted in six classes (Form IV) with 205 students with a sample of 94 respondents. Data represent students' statements that describe (a) the role of Mathematics teachers in a computer-assisted instruction (CAI) environment and (b) effectiveness of CAI in Mathematics instruction. The results indicated…

This paper focuses on the significance of physical education teacher education (PETE) in the diffusion of "new" thinking about sport teaching in physical education. It explores issues arising from a case study investigation that sought to respond to the critical commentary about the form and substance of sport teaching in physical…

An experimental field study at a German university was conducted in order to test the effectiveness of an integrated learning environment to improve the acquisition of knowledge about empirical research methods. The integrated learning environment was based on the combination of instruction-oriented and problem-oriented design principles and…

Failure to "activate" relevant, existing background knowledge may be a cause of poor reading comprehension. This failure may cause particular problems with inferences that depend heavily on prior knowledge. Conversely, teaching how to use background knowledge in the context of gap-filling inferences could improve reading comprehension in…

In this study, a follow-up analysis of the data reported in Lin et al. ("Learn Media Technol." doi: 10.1080/17439884.2011.629660 , 2011), we investigated the relationship between student use of a virtual field trip (VFT) system and the probability of students reporting wanting to visit the national park site upon which the VFT was modeled,…

Background: The study deepened our understanding of how students' self-ef?cacy beliefs contribute to the context of teaching English as a foreign language in the framework of cognitive mediational paradigm at a ?ne-tuned task-speci?c level. Aim: The aim was to examine the relationship among task complexity, self-ef?cacy beliefs, domain-related…

Students are non-randomly assigned, or sorted, into classrooms in various ways across and within schools. In this study, we use longitudinal data sets from three districts to investigate a metric for the characterization of sorting at the school level. We analyze whether non-random student assignment is associated with value-added estimates for…

The purpose of this design experiment was to research, test and iteratively design a set of taxonomically-organized storybooks that served to scaffold young children's word learning and concept development. Specifically, Phase 1 of the design experiment asked: (1) What are the effects of taxonomic organization on children's ability to acquire…

This paper reports on an investigation into managing cognitive conflict in the context of student learning about decimal magnitude. The influence of prior constructs is examined through a brief review of the literature. A micro-genetic approach was used to capture detail of the teaching intervention used to facilitate development in student…

In his last commentary on "Biochemistry Denatured," this author dealt with his perception that college students today have spent too little of their childhood years playing outside in nature and as a consequence have not learned basic things about the world from personal experience. This "nature-deficit disorder" removes many opportunities for…

The issue of whether or not entrepreneurs really learn from experience has been one of the key themes of entrepreneurship research. If they do learn from experience, what do they learn? The importance of knowledge and learning to the performance of a business has been highlighted by many authors, who emphasize the role of life cycle, learning from…

This study first used a new approach, combining students' ontological beliefs and process explanations, to represent students' mental models of heat conduction and then examined the relationships between their mental models and their predictions. Clinical interviews were conducted to probe 30 undergraduate physics students' mental models and their…

Reasoning skills are major contributors to academic and everyday life success. Epistemological commitments (ECs) are believed to underlie reasoning processes and, when considered, could do much in delineating the complex nature of scientific reasoning. This study examined the relationship between ECs and scientific reasoning among college science…