Using a mixed methods research design, this study compared the athletic director's perceptions of the present and preferred organizational cultures with the perceptions of the athletic department employees at Big State University. As the pace of change has accelerated in athletic departments, it has become more important for members of these…

Purpose: Evidence has shown that group conversation treatment may improve communication and reduce social isolation for people with aphasia. However, little is known about the impact of conversation group treatment on measures of discourse. This project explored the impact of conversation treatment on measures of monologic discourse. Method: In…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify staff skills and competencies on which Chinese open universities should focus their professional development activities in order to enhance the quality of open and distance learning (ODL) in China. Design/methodology/approach: Data were collected from surveys of 220 academic and academic-related…

Lexical metaphor functions as a rhetorical device that embellishes the texts with figurative meanings. In non-literary texts such as commercial texts on company websites, lexical metaphor can help to promote the company image and sales. It is vital in the service sector such as the airline industry where the competition is sky-high. This paper…

There is international consensus that creativity is a fundamental outcome of schooling. Opportunities exist to enhance the creativity of schoolchildren, particularly in movement-based subjects such as physical education (PE). In this pilot study, we investigated the effect of a six-week dance-based PE intervention on children's creativity in a…

The distinction between face-to-face and distant digitally-mediated educational engagement is a complex one, and the two modes are often combined in practice, via 'blended learning' or the use of a VLE [Virtual Learning Environment] to support campus-based teaching. The current COVID-19 pandemic has thrown this distinction into relief, in a…

Although there have been calls in the early childhood field for effective approaches to preparing the workforce to support optimal early child development, there is a gap in understanding how different types of professional development predict teachers' beliefs about children and their self-reported classroom practices. Using the National Survey…

No study thus far has investigated music engagement in the home among sectors of society, that because of cultural and/or ethno-religious characteristics, have a drastically different lifestyle and home environment than typically ordinary conventional local residents, who represent the more hegemonic popular Western liberal-minded secular culture.…

While research has repeatedly found evidence that readers infer characters' emotions, we investigate three outstanding questions about the content and time course of such inferences. We ask whether even simple narratives give rise to emotion inferences, in what form such inferences are encoded into long-term memory, and whether they are uniquely…

This experiment tests the age at which left-to-right spatial associations found in infancy shift to culture-specific spatial biases in later childhood, for both numerical and non-numerical information. Children ages 1-5 years (N = 320) were tested within an eye-tracking paradigm which required passive viewing of a video portraying a spatial…

Recently, it has been argued that improving students' genomics literacy could prevent students from developing erroneous beliefs about social identity, such as the belief that racial groups differ cognitively and behaviorally because of their genes; a belief called genetic essentialism. To date, however, little research has explored if or how a…

Scoring language learners' speaking skills is open to a number of measurement errors since raters' personal judgements could involve in the process. Different grading designs in which raters score a student's whole speaking skills or a specific dimension of the speaking performance could be settled to control and minimize the amount of the error…

Mobility is becoming a defining feature of today's globalising society. Individuals move for a variety of reasons, including finding employment or pursuing education. This paper focuses on the interrelationship between two different types of migrants who have all moved out of one specific country to another. It builds on the perceptions of Turkish…

The purpose of this article is to present the methodology and the results of active learning application in an Engineering Education institution in Brazil, using repeated measures experimental design. It involved taking course samples from 7 engineering programs, providing 6 classes, 202 participant students and 296 class-hours. The design had a…

Inspired by the work of David Raffe and his co-authors who set out the positive benefits gained from comparing the policies of "the UK home nations" in an article published in 1999, researchers in the Education and Curriculum Team launched a project in early 2020 that we called Curriculum Watch. The aim of this project was to collate a…