The aim of this paper is to offer an additional perspective to the understanding of educational change processes by clarifying the significance of identity learning. Today's innovations require changes in teachers' professional identity. Identity learning involves a relation between social-cognitive construction of new meanings and individual,…

This article describes the empirical research that contributed to the development of the model of "effective school improvement". The focus is mainly on the findings of that research but the problematic nature of designing a methodology that is applicable in 8 very different education systems is also discussed. The 4 key factors to emerge from the…

Sport scientists have examined numerous factors influencing the acquisition and manifestation of high levels of performance. These factors can be divided into variables having a primary influence on expertise and variables that have a secondary influence through their interaction with other variables. Primary influences on expertise include…

How do infants come to understand references to absent objects? 14-month-old infants first learned a name for a novel toy, which was then placed out of view. The infants who listened to a story mentioning the nonvisible object, looked, pointed, and searched for it more often than did infants who heard a story using a different name. Their behavior…

Three studies examined the effects of context on decisions about the reality status of novel entities. In Experiment 1 (144, 3- to 5-year-olds), participants less often claimed that novel entities were real when they were introduced in a fantastical than in a scientific context. Experiment 2 (61, 4- to 5-year-olds) revealed that defining novel…

From a communication infrastructure theory perspective, the current study examined individuals' civic engagement (neighborhood belonging, collective efficacy, and civic participation) as influenced by 2 multilevel components of the communication infrastructure--an integrated connectedness to a storytelling network (ICSN) and the residential…

Why are some words easier to learn than others? And what enables the eventual learning of the more difficult words? These questions were addressed for nouns using a paradigm in which adults were exposed to naturalistic maternal input that was manipulated to simulate access to several different information sources, both alone and in combination:…

Over the last ten years the role of the teaching assistant has undergone continued change and development. This article identifies many of the different contexts in which teaching assistants support behaviour for learning and further explores some of the challenges raised by workforce remodelling. Barry Groom argues that this could be an…

The concept of place-based education plays an important role in shaping the English language arts curriculum. A crucial element in one's ability to live well as individuals and as communities is the way in which people connect to a place.

We report an investigation of 9-year-olds' ability to interpret idioms in relation to their reading comprehension level. We manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, whether they were real or novel, whether they were presented in isolation or in a supportive narrative context. As predicted, children were better able to explain the…

Two experiments were conducted to determine the mechanism underlying the spacing effect in free-recall tasks. Participants were required to study a list containing once-presented words as well as massed and spaced repetitions. In both experiments, presentation background at repetition was manipulated. The results of Experiment 1 demonstrated that…

The field of drama in education has been developing a rich tradition of practice separate from the literature of educational and cognitive psychology. This article draws links between the practice of drama in education and cognitive theory, focusing specifically on the area of situated learning. Rather than confine learning to the context of the…

This commentary discusses the methodological challenges of researching the intersection of online and offline activities of an adolescent girl engaged in instant messaging. If the New Literacy Studies stance that literacy practices are locally situated is accepted, a methodology for interrogating the multiple online and offline contexts that…

In the single-store model of memory, the enhanced recall for the last items in a free-recall task (i.e., the recency effect) is understood to reflect a general property of memory rather than a separate short-term store. This interpretation is supported by the finding of a long-term recency effect under conditions that eliminate the contribution…

Several investigations have shown that young infants perceive the unity of a center-occluded object when the visible ends of the object undergo common motion but not when the object remains stationary. This study is an extension of earlier investigations on object unity in that it assesses amodal completion of stationary circles in which one half…