This article draws on research undertaken in Scotland as part of an International Study of Principal Preparation (ISPP). The study is designed to address the question "How useful are principal preparation programmes to novice headteachers?" Drawing on the research data from Scotland, the authors examine how novice headteachers navigate…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to describe the preappointment experiences of early-career headteachers in Tanzania and to discuss implications for postsecondary institutions and ministries of education in East Africa. Research Design: Seven novice headteachers in a suburb of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, completed questionnaires and participated…

Instruction in peer assessment of complex task performance may cause high cognitive load, impairing learning. A stepwise instructional strategy aimed at reducing cognitive load was investigated by comparing it with a combined instructional strategy in an experiment with 128 secondary school students (mean age 14.0 years; 45.2% male) with the…

Schwab (1978) argued that curriculum emerged in the commonplaces of teacher, learner, subject matter and milieu. It was in these four frames that I narratively explored my own development as an English teacher and curriculum planner around Shakespeare's work, particularly "The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet." In this narrative, I relate four…

Over the last decade, Sub-Saharan Africa has experienced an increased volume of funding and training activities to support research capacity development. However, there are persistent deficits in the number of active investigators conducting independent research with their own grants. To address this deficit, research institutions need to find an…

Students are frequently presented with novel visualizations introducing scientific concepts and processes normally unobservable to the naked eye. Despite being unfamiliar, students are expected to understand and employ the visualizations to solve problems. Domain experts exhibit more competency than novices when using complex visualizations, but…

The introductory computer programming (CP) course has been taught for three decades in the faculty. Besides pursuing CP technology, one major goal has been enhancing learners' problem-solving (PS) skills. However, the current situation has implied that this might not be the case. Therefore, a research was conducted to investigate the effects of a…

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal,…

This book examines how Russian-speaking adoptees in three US families actively shape opportunities for language learning and identity construction in everyday interactions. By focusing on a different practice in each family (i.e. narrative talk about the day, metalinguistic discourse or languaging, and code-switching), the analyses uncover…

The present study examined various aspects of the development of learners' fluency in Japanese using a large set of speech samples collected over a long period, using an online speaking practice/assessment system called "Speak Everywhere." The purpose of the present study was to examine: (1) how the fluency related measures changed over…

Demand for medical Spanish courses has grown with the rising needs of Spanish-speaking patients in the United States, but while there is no shortage of beginning medical Spanish textbooks, very few target the intermediate level. This article examines eighteen medical Spanish texts published in the last twenty years with respect to seven factors:…

Mentoring and induction programs are popular within the public school system in the United States. Additionally, content-based mentoring programs exist, such as those within agricultural education. A number of studies yielded results that showed a relationship between mentoring/induction participation and teacher retention. The importance of the…

Novice teacher attrition has long been a concern among educators and policy makers who have responded with various types of induction and mentoring programs and increased efforts to recruit more teachers. Yet, these efforts have not created the stable work force needed to implement school reform efforts. The school staffing challenge is further…

Practitioner-researchers are well-positioned to apply qualitative methods to the study of significant problems of educational practice. However, while learning the skills of qualitative inquiry, practitioners may be compelled by forces outside of qualitative research classrooms to think quantitatively. In this article, the author considers two…

Gettysburg College President Janet Morgan Riggs and Board Chair Robert N. Duelks are both members of the Gettysburg class of 1977, but did not know each other as students. As a member of the college's board of trustees, Duelks chaired the presidential search committee that selected Riggs as Gettysburg's 14th president in 2009. Then, one year after…