Amid reports of superintendent shortages and concerns about equal opportunity, what place do women superintendents occupy in today's school districts? Are they sought after or are they struggling to break into a traditionally male-dominated profession? What qualities, if any, do they bring to the office that may make them more desirable as…

The purpose of this study was to describe the development and validation of an instrument to identify various dimensions of scientific epistemological views (SEVs) held by high school students. The instrument included five SEV dimensions (subscales): the role of social negotiation on science, the invented and creative reality of science, the…

Writing-to-learn techniques can enhance learning, yet a need remains for more empirical research on the quality of learning that results from engaging in particular writing tasks with description of the instructional support for writing situated in context. This report builds on past research linking inquiry, social negotiation, and writing…

This research explored links between cognition (both social and academic) and children's behaviour in a bullying situation (participant roles). Participants were 186 fourth to sixth grade boys and girls from four primary schools in central Greece. Six categories of social cognition (self-efficacy for assertion, self-efficacy for aggression,…

To a great extent the nature of the relationship between the cognitive style of a student teacher and their predominant teaching style in the classroom has been ignored by educational research. This study used an opportunist sample of 84 trainee teachers studying for one year full time for a Post Graduate Certificate in Education, in a range of…

This article is concerned with comparing learning and achievement in the context of computer aided learning (CAL) and traditionally taught environments. The results of a small-scale study involving 49 Year 10 pupils from a school in the north-east of England are reported. Cognitive style, gender, attitude to CAL, and test results from a unit of…

Recently, research into gender differences in achievement has mainly concentrated on the underperformance of boys in comparison with girls. Qualitative research in particular points to the importance of the gender-specific cultures adolescents experience. The purpose of this article is to test quantitatively the explanatory value of academic…

In this analysis, single-sex and mixed schools are compared in terms of pupils' television viewing habits, the latter factor being considered as an indicator of a pupil's sense of educational responsibilities. It was hypothesized that the presumably lower levels of television watching among girls attending single-sex schools could be explained by…

The identity of the underachiever has become synonymous with the stereotypical identity of boys. Teachers know what underachievement looks like: it looks like a boy who is bright, but bored. Evidence from a research study reported here demonstrates that teachers are more likely to select boys as underachievers than girls and that teachers…

In this paper we have set out to search for similarities and differences between the Nordic countries concerning patterns of competencies defined as scientific literacy in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) study. The first part focuses on gender differences concerning the two types of competencies, understanding of…

The initial results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) indicated that Finnish and Swedish students are among the best readers in all OECD countries. However, the literacy performance of 7% of Finnish and 12% of Swedish students remains at a level which is not sufficient for further studies or active citizenship. This…

Research in preschool classrooms has shown that boys receive more attention from their teachers than girls do, and also that misbehavior is positively associated with teacher attention. However, these previous findings relate primarily to total attention, ignoring the many different types of teacher attention that are likely to have different…

Various acoustic measures of speaking rate were calculated for 40 adult speakers of New Zealand English (NZE). These measures were then compared to a group of 40 adult speakers of American English (AE). Results of the analysis identified significantly faster overall speaking rate and articulation rate for the NZE group compared to the AE group. No…

Whereas there has been strong advocacy of the value of writing for learning in science, the role of student planning in this approach and the relationships between planning, writing, and learning have been underresearched. Our mixed method study aimed to address this issue by seeking to identify quantitative differences in learning outcomes…

Indoor tanning continues to grow in popularity even though empirical investigations denounce the behavior. Various reports have illustrated the detrimental health effects of ultraviolet (UV) exposure including increased risk for skin cancer. According to some physicians, the risk may be especially high for adolescents whose skin cells are dividing…