Adequacy as a concept or philosophy has recently emerged as part of school finance literature and policy in South Africa. Broadly defined as sufficient input levels to ensure student achievement of learning goals, adequacy has roots in school finance litigation in the United States of America. A review of school finance literature shows different…

Psychologists and educators have often conceptualized motivation as an individual difference variable, something that some students simply have more of than other students. This view of motivation can underestimate contextual influences. In this article we consider how characteristics of the school and classroom may influence student motivation,…

Race or ethnicity, demographic, and disability factors were investigated as predictors of vocational rehabilitation acceptance. Severity of disability was the strongest predictor, followed by education, a secondary disability, race or ethnicity, and age at the time of application; gender was not significant. Acceptance rates differed with specific…

Minority responses to mainstream schooling have been characterized as ranging from assimilation to resistance. Based on a three-year ethnographic study, this article suggests that such a continuum is inadequate for interpreting the longevity and vibrancy of an Old Order Mennonite community. This durability can be attributed to a "third…

This article is a response to S. Elizabeth Bird and Jonathan P. Godwin's article "Film in the Undergraduate Anthropology Classroom: Applying Audience Response Research in Pedagogical Practice." The intention of my response is to expand the dialogue on film use to promote cultural understanding in university classes and campus-wide. Through…

A zoo outreach program led to placing animals in classrooms where those animals became foci for numerous learning activities such as writing, observing, and care. Systematic debriefings suggested uniqueness to learning outcomes connected to zoo animals. Subsequent analysis of student writing indicated that students responded to situational…

This study explored youths' and parents' perceptions of family interaction processes as well as the broader social and cultural factors that influence family functioning in a multiethnic sample of inner-city families with delinquent youth. In-depth interviews were conducted with 61 male youths and 33 parents predominantly from minority families.…

The article explores the complexities of educational scale-making. "Educational scales" are defined as the spatial and temporal orders generated as pupils and teachers move and are moved through educational systems; scales are "envelopes of spacetime" into which certain schoolbased identities (and not others) can be folded.…

This article looks into how masculinities are constructed in a mother tongue fifth grade reading classroom in Rio de Janeiro by focusing on the stories pupils tell one another in this context. The article follows a socio-constructionist view of discourse and social identities, such that stories are taken as resources used in the construction of…

In 2001 Erica Burman offered a strong critique of the individually oriented developmental psychology which, she argued, underpinned much of early years' practice. She proposed that this should be replaced by an attempt to understand how culture informs development. In this paper I attempt to continue the discussion started by Burman by looking at…

An appropriate understanding of the nature of the scientific enterprise (NOSE) is a key element of scientific literacy and can arguably be influenced through an exploration of the history of science. An elective, undergraduate History of Science course was organized in the form of small-group discussion-based inquiries into the history of science…

This paper focuses on the results of a study examining the relationship among gender, leadership style and principal selection. A sample of 64 Arizona elementary teachers participated in the study. Key issues related to gender and leadership style were identified through a literature review, teacher ratings of four fictitious principals, coded…

The authors examined the effects of age and ability (as measured by education and verbal ability) on self-reported memory functioning in adulthood. In Study 1, the age and ability groups responded similarly to the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (D. E. Broadbent, P. F. Cooper, P. Fitzgerald, & K. R. Parkes, 1982), but differences emerged when the…

The aim of the present study was to investigate idiom comprehension in school-age Italian children with different reading comprehension skills. According to our hypothesis, the level of a child's text comprehension skills should predict his/her ability to understand idiomatic meanings. Idiom comprehension in fact requires children to go beyond a…

This article presents a framework for the cognitive diagnosis of learners' errors in an interactive learning activity occurring in an intelligent learning environment. The proposed framework supports the implementation of an authoring tool. This tool helps instructional designers to specify the features of a component for cognitive diagnosis. Two…