Along with the development of linguistic science, the second language acquisition (SLA) has become an independent subject. Its theory is widely accepted and applied to the foreign language-teaching field. The mark theory, the mother tongue transfer theory, language input theory, cultural introject theory and so on have important enlightenment and…

What happens in a final project that fosters teaching for understanding? That inquiry calls to mind the Taoist belief that emptiness makes a cup useful. In the context of this paper, the inquiry organizes a narrative about how teaching for understanding surfaced in a "Theories of Learning" course at Edward Waters College. At a deeper…

The article reports on a small-scale in-depth research study investigating formative assessment enacted and theorised from a sociocultural perspective within a part-time Professional Doctorate in Education (EdD) programme in an English university. Going beyond its conventional conceptualisation within psychological and motivational frameworks,…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine organizational practice to investigate what insights could be gained to support and extend existing theory. Design/methodology/approach: Adopts a clinical approach, e.g. not a priori or an academic one where data are mangled to fit a theoretical stance. Findings: Data analysis reveals four…

Purpose: This paper aims to describe a method of teaching that is based on Novak's concept-mapping technique. Design/methodology/approach: The paper shows how concept mapping can be used to measure prior knowledge and how simple mapping exercises can promote the integration of teachers' and students' understandings in ways that are meaningful.…

Beginning in the summer of 2002, a Queen's University arts education research team has met weekly for art-making sessions. This research paper describes how this long-term art-making practice has influenced the personal and professional lives of the team, based on semi-standardized interviews with six participants and one observer of the…

Previous work within self-determination theory has shown that experimentally framing a learning activity in terms of extrinsic rather than intrinsic goals results in poorer conceptual learning and performance, presumably because extrinsic goal framing detracts attention from the learning activity and is less directly satisfying of basic…

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate the influence of professional and academic identities in online teaching practices in higher education. Design/methodology/approach: This paper draws on data from a longitudinal study of five professional degree academics teaching subjects in nursing, teaching, engineering, allied health sciences, and…

New technologies are increasingly becoming a component of education, as computers are integrated into both students' lives and as a teacher's tool of management and teaching. At the same time, constructivist learning theories have had extensive effects at the level of learning paradigms and in prescribed education goals. Yet there are worrying…

This article sets out reasons for arguing that creativity is not garnish to the roast of industry or of education--i.e. the reasoning behind Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's insistence that creativity is not only about elites but involves everyone. This article investigates three key domains--scholarship, commerce and learning--to argue the importance…

In order to develop successful teaching approaches to transformations of matter, we need to know more about how young students develop an understanding of these processes. In this longitudinal study, we followed 25 students from 7 to 13 years of age in their reasoning about transformations of matter. The questions addressed included how the…

Interest in constructivism has fueled enthusiasm for the development of games and team-sport pedagogy over the past decade, but individual sports have yet to receive the same attention. In this article we redress this oversight by suggesting that constructivist perspectives on learning can be used to develop student-centered, inquiry-based…

This paper begins with a consideration of some important themes dealt with in the paper by Treagust and Duit. These include the relationship between research on conceptual change and educational practice, the significance of emotion and identity in the process of conceptual change, and role of cognitive conflict in motivating change. I then argue…

Many libraries offer for-credit courses that intend to foster information literacy. These courses will be strengthened if the librarian as instructor has a familiarity with learning theory. This article suggests that Robert Gagne's "Nine Events of Instruction," based on information processing theory, can provide support to bibliographic…

The use of design patterns is now well established as an approach within the field of software systems as well as within the field of architecture. An initial effort was made to harness patterns as a tool for elaborating the design of the elements of personal learning environments as part of the University of Bolton's Personal Learning Environment…