Employing organizations are the main beneficiaries of accreditation of work-based learning. Universities involved in providing it need to safeguard the interests of learners and society from exploitation. Work-based learning needs to be viewed beyond the narrow skills and competencies approach, recognizing and valuing practical judgment in job…

Fifty older and 50 younger adults with varying familiarity with standard keyboards performed 3 trials with the Dvorak keyboard. Older participants performed worse, but there was no relationship between age and familiarity. The amount of new information and not preexperimental interference from prior knowledge may account for age differences. (SK)

Compared two different guided questioning strategies and unguided questioning and assessed the knowledge construction of 48 fourth and fifth graders in the questioning conditions. Results support the conclusion that questions designed to access prior knowledge and experience are more effective in enhancing learning than questions simply designed…

Explains an educational framegame called Information Basketball for adult or teen players that can be used as a review or informal group testing of previously learned materials. Includes a question set example and discusses debriefing, including sample debriefing questions. (LRW)

The facilitative effect of expertise in hypertext information retrieval (IR) tasks has been widely reported in related literature. However, recent theories of human expertise question the robustness of this result, since previous works have not fully considered the interaction between user and system characteristics. In this study, the constraint…

Students bring a variety of experiences and prior learning with media to the classroom. And, when learning is described from a number of different theories of learning, it is these experiences on which students will construct their new learning. For today's learners, these experiences, although varied, are very likely to include experiences…

This study examined the effects of providing reading strategy instruction to improve the effectiveness of self-explanation (i.e., explaining the meaning of information to oneself while reading). The effects of the reading strategy instruction, called Self-Explanation Reading Training (SERT), were examined both in terms of comprehension scores and…

Prior knowledge has a marked effect on learning outcomes. Researchers typically rely on a number of methodologies to control for that factor in learning research, including the use of fictional stimuli and domain-novice subjects. The experiments reported here demonstrate that such methodological controls may be insufficient. In Experiment 1,…

Personalization will be a key element in the future of executive education. Personalization is based on a match between student characteristics (user model) and didactic treatments (teaching model). This article distinguishes two matching strategies: an educational institution can deliver on demand, or can anticipate the demand and offer students…

The quality of output from a process, to a substantial extent, depends upon quality of the input. The performance of an educational institution badly suffers when it faces a "wear out" in the quality of its in-take. Sometimes it is a deficient induction criterion due to which inappropriate elements hold majority in admitted population of…

This mixed method research study explored the role of metacognitive awareness in reading among adult English as a Second Language (ESL) students of various academic levels enrolled in a university in the southeastern part of the United States of America while engaged in academic reading. In addition, this study examined metacognitive reading…

When people hear the term "urban", they immediately associate it with negative attributes such as poverty stricken students and families, ill-prepared students, run down facilities, and an inconsistency in teachers. When compared to any kind of school whether its' private or public, urban school districts have the worst label of all. Why is there…

Starting from difficulties that students of education display when they interpret empirical findings and generate scientific arguments, a problem-based e-learning environment was developed. Based on first evaluation data, an elaboration tool was integrated into the learning environment. The tool consisted of a modelling and an explanation part. In…

This study investigated the effect of providing students with the objectives of a lesson before the lesson delivery on their achievement at the end of the lesson. Two hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The quasi-experimental pretest-posttest-control group design was used, with a total of 4 groups. All four groups were taught the same…

Students attending a lecture usually have a wide range of prior knowledge about the topic in question. Rather than seeing this as a problem, lecturers can take advantage of such differences. This article shows how students' misconceptions about old age were used to inform a lecture on the topic. Prior knowledge can thus be used to aid teaching and…