Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the advantages of using intelligent agents to facilitate the location and customization of appropriate e-learning resources and to foster collaboration in e-learning environments. Design/methodology/approach: This paper proposes an e-learning environment that can be used to provide customized…

Research into student teachers' perceptions, attitudes and prior experiences of learning suggests that these experiences can exert an influence on practice which can be relatively undisturbed by their initial teacher education. This article is based on the initial findings of an all-Ireland survey of all first-year students on B.Ed. courses in…

In this paper, the author would like to put forward a number of issues to think about and discuss. At the same time, she argues for a better articulated system that more closely matches the needs and goals of various subgroups of English language learners. Adult ESL programs serve diverse immigrant populations with different needs and goals. A…

Findings from a quasi-experimental study of children's ideas about the solar system and how these ideas changed in response to a 10-week intervention period of formal astronomy teaching at a single primary school in England are presented in detail. Initial interviews with all of the 9- to 11-year-olds involved revealed a relatively poorly…

In the last 2 decades, the United States has seen an increase in childlessness and first births at older ages. Using the National Survey of Family Growth, we focus on women aged 35-44 who are voluntarily childless (expect no children and are fecund or contraceptively sterile). We compare these women to those who are involuntarily childless…

UK national initiatives in education, such as the National Literacy and Numeracy Strategies, have been implemented to improve learning and raise standards. These initiatives place considerable significance on whole class interactive teaching, and political rhetoric makes great play of this pedagogic strategy. Teachers have been encouraged to use…

Adjunct aids are instructional interventions inserted in textbooks in view of supporting learners to process the information. Different types of adjunct aids are assumed to support different cognitive processes. Research on adjunct aids has focussed on the learning effects of single types of adjunct aids. In this study, the learning effects of…

This paper reports the results of an exploratory study of the perceptions of and approaches to mathematical proof of undergraduates enrolled in lecture-based and problem-based "transition to proof" courses. While the students in the lecture-based course demonstrated conceptions of proof that reflect those reported in the research literature as…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on the personality characteristics of mentors. Design/methodology/approach: The five factor model of personality was used to examine relationships between personality and participation as a mentor. A sample of 194 practicing veterinarians were surveyed on the five factor model of personality and a…

The author recently read a research paper by Padberg (2002), in which the development of understanding associated with decimal fractions was studied. Padberg (2002) outlined the situation that existed in Germany, where students were introduced to decimal fractions in the sixth year of school. He claimed that it was assumed students would have a…

We examined whether the text understanding of students holding naive and sophisticated epistemological beliefs was differentially affected by text format, also controlling for effects of gender, word decoding, and prior knowledge on understanding. The participants were 39 Norwegian first-year teacher students, and the topic of reading was…

In this article (the edited keynote address to the NAEYC 15th National Institute for Early Childhood Professional Development in June) Bowman defines the four different kinds of standards-for programs, content, learning or performance, and professional development-and explains her beliefs about them. Regarding content and learning standards,…

The purpose of this article is to describe an action research study on the discourse patterns that seemed to best promote "developed" discussions of literature with fifth-grade struggling readers in an urban school. Developed discussions are those in which a substantial topic is maintained and the teacher-student talk included interpretations of…

"Bologna with Student Eyes" is a survey published by the National Unions of Students in Europe, based on questionnaires sent to national unions across the continent. The survey gives a broad overview of student union perspectives as to national implementations of Bologna Process Action Lines in the period 2005-2007. It addresses the…

In this article we report assessment results from two studies in an ongoing design experiment intended to provide a single school system with a sequence of secondary school level (ages 14-18) computer technology courses. In our first study, we share data on students' learning as a function of the required introductory course and their pre-course…