Caregivers and early childhood teachers all over the world use singing and speech to elicit and maintain infants' attention. Research comparing infants' preferential attention to music and speech is inconclusive regarding their responses to these two types of auditory stimuli, with one study showing a music bias and another one…

Motivation as a variable in L2 development is no longer seen as the stable individual difference factor it was once believed to be: Influenced by process-oriented models and principles, and especially by the growing understanding of how complex dynamic systems work, researchers have been focusing increasingly on the dynamic and changeable nature…

Teaching observation is widely promoted as a mechanism for developing teaching practice in higher education. Specifically, formative peer observation is considered by many to be a powerful tool for providing feedback to individual teachers, disseminating disciplinary good practice and fostering a local evaluative enhancement culture. Despite its…

Peer observation of teaching (POT) is a reciprocal process where a peer observes another's teaching (classroom, virtual, on-line or even teaching resource such as unit outlines, assignments). Peers then provide constructive feedbacks that would enable teaching professional development through the mirror of critical reflection by both the observer…

In this article, I place my ethnographic project among undergraduate university art students and their professor in dialog with Rosi Braidotti's figuration of the nomadic subject and her reflections on the importance of creating theoretical alternatives for mapping the embedded and embodied social positions that we inhabit. As educational…

Research Findings: Pretend play is an important context that supports young children's developing social-cognitive and creative abilities. The play behaviors of 70 sibling dyads in early and middle childhood were examined for the following indices of creativity in play: (a) play themes (set-up/organization, expected, creative), (b) object use…

Mentors play a key role in developing preservice teachers for their chosen careers, and providing feedback appears as a significant relational interaction between the mentor and mentee that assists in guiding the mentee's practices. But what are mentors' perspectives on providing feedback to their mentees? In this case study, eight…

Mothers' mental-state references predict individual differences in preschoolers' false-belief (FB) understanding; less is known about the origins of corresponding variation in school-age children. To address this gap, 105 children completed observations with their mothers at child ages 2 and 6, three FB tasks and a verbal comprehension…

Deficit ways of speaking about educationally displaced young people are a dominant feature in the language educators draw on to make sense of particular young people. This language can have debilitating effects on the lives of those young people it is applied to. Despite well over 20 years of critique, deficit truths have remained dominant.…

This article reports on how one teacher education program utilized a Learn and Serve America grant to embed service-learning experiences into its practices. Included are narrative reflections on how the program faculty developed a community-based, participatory approach to service-learning in order to act as a responsive partner to the needs of…

Scholars and practitioners advocate for the use of social skills interventions for students with emotional disabilities because significant social skills deficits are common among these students. Yet contemporary practices must be vetted for empirical evidence of their efficacy and effectiveness to ensure students are provided appropriate…

Children who are visually impaired (that is, those who are blind or have low vision) commonly engage in stereotypic behaviors such as rocking and repetitive hand movements to gain sensory stimulation produced by the behavior (Gourgey, 1998; Rapp, 2004; Warren, 1984). A means of quickly and easily reducing problem behaviors is important to maximize…

We used surveys and classroom observations to examine student reactions to two-stage exams, where students first do the exam individually and then redo it collaboratively. Our results show why both students and instructors appreciate this examination format: Two-stage collaborative examinations are relatively easy to implement, have a high…

This article examines the case studies of 2 middle grades professional learning communities that focused on teaching and learning with new literacies strategies. The new literacies theoretical lens that frames this study recognizes literacy as multimodal (e.g., print, image, sound) and tied to one's sociocultural identities and…

This article investigates the interplay between learning and economy in the cooperation between participants from different professions on a construction site. From a situated perspective it is claimed that learning and economy are linked in two different ways: Firstly, it is argued that the participants have differing economic interests, which…