This paper reports on an investigation into first year students' perceptions of IT as a career. There are many stereotypes of the typical IT professional. These stereotypes are often depicted in the media and affect students' perceptions of the career and whether they should study IT or not. An exploratory study into male and female first year…

Despite the best attempts of academic staff to teach students the mechanics of citation, the rules of referencing continue to be broken, particularly by those new to Western university systems (either first-year undergraduate students or international students from different cultural backgrounds). In late 2003, 16 postgraduate international…

We report the development of an assessment instrument that provides a profile of the attainment and the errors of pre-service primary teachers across the mathematics curriculum. We describe test development, analyses and test validation involving a sample of 426 pre-service teachers in the first year of their training in primary education courses…

In Singapore, special education has traditionally been perceived as distinct from general education. Students with learning and behavioral difficulties in general education classrooms are often neglected. Typically, this is due to the fact that many general education teachers lack the competencies required to work with students with diverse…

This article describes the results of two focus groups of immigrant parents who recently experienced child protective investigations in New York City. The purpose of this study was: (1) to hear immigrant parents describe their experiences with child welfare services, (2) to identify barriers to services these parents encountered, and (3) advocate…

Supplemental instruction classes have been shown in many studies to enhance performance in the supported courses and even to improve graduation rates. Generally, there has been little evidence of a differential impact on students from different ethnic/racial backgrounds. At San Francisco State University, however, supplemental instruction in the…

This study analyzed graphical solutions of 344 students in grades 4 through college who were administered a 40-item assessment of basic fraction concepts. Of particular interest were six problems that required students to complete the whole given a fractional part presented in area contexts and set contexts. Results indicated that fourth graders…

This paper describes the development of a diagnostic test to assess teachers' understanding of the learning cycle and highlights common misconceptions identified through the administration of the diagnostic instrument. The Learning Cycle Test was administered to 28 undergraduate students enrolled in elementary science methods who had received…

In 1991, after 25 workers died in a fire in a rural North Carolina poultry-processing plant, reporters exposed the exploitation that workers had endured and the company's callous disregard for workers' safety. This paper draws on the story of the fire and its victims to challenge some popular assumptions about poverty in general; rural poverty in…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of a problem solving based instructional model on earth science students' achievement and alternative frameworks. Students' opinions toward the instructional method were also investigated. The investigations employed a pretest/posttest control group design to detect any significant change.…

People who suffer from body dysmorphic disorder believe that their body is defected and that this defect makes them ugly. Their distorted body image can be precipitated by many internal and external factors and as a result of their imagined defect, these normal-appearing individuals exhibit self-defeating behaviors. The disorder can lead to the…

This research explores the moment-by-moment understanding students exhibit in the learning of a non-physical science domain--the human circulatory system. The goal was to understand how students learn by capturing the nature of their initial mental models (naive conceptions), and by seeing how new information gets assimilated into their mental…

This study presents a quantitative method for scoring concept maps generated by students learning introductory college chemistry. Concept maps measure the amount of chemical information the student possesses, reasoning ability in chemistry, and specific misconceptions about introductory and physical chemistry concepts. They provide a visualization…

This paper examines how temporal and spatial observation variables can drastically alter a visitor's comprehension of the phenomena depicted by a museum exhibit. The focus is on a tornado exhibit at the Exploratorium, a museum of science and human perception in San Francisco (California). Videotaped recordings of 10 children interacting with the…

This paper reports the results of two empirical studies which explored the information seeking behaviour of engineering and law students in Ireland. Findings reveal similar patterns in the information seeking behaviour between students studying to become professionals and information seeking patterns of these groups identified in the Leckie et al.…