This study investigated goal setting for learning English language of Bangkok University students. A set of questionnaires for the assessment of goal settings and problems of learning English was administered to 370 second-year students. The study revealed that the goal setting was at a moderate level. There were statistically significant…

This study addresses the link between urban teachers' beliefs about their students' ability to succeed in astronomy and their instructional decisions and practices in response to those beliefs. The findings suggest that teachers believe that the student characteristics that are necessary for high achievement in astronomy include specific cognitive…

Behavioural, neuroimaging and neurophysiological approaches emphasise the active and constructive nature of visual perception, determined not solely by the environmental input, but modulated top-down by prior knowledge. For example, degraded images, which at first appear as meaningless "blobs", can easily be recognized as, say, a face, after…

The authors report the results of a European project, Lifelearn, and discuss how lifeplace learning (LPL) can be used to effect appropriate learning opportunities for all. The project tested the concept of valuing and accrediting learning from life experiences in higher education in Europe, and its conclusions suggest that LPL is valuable for both…

The process of giving official acknowledgment to formal, informal and non-formal prior learning is commonly labelled as assessment, accreditation or recognition of prior learning (APL), representing a practice that is expanding in higher education in many countries. This paper focuses specifically on the assessment part of APL, which undoubtedly…

The Text Feature Walk is a structure created and employed by the authors that guides students in the reading of text features in order to access prior knowledge, make connections, and set a purpose for reading expository text. Results from a pilot study are described in order to illustrate the benefits of using the Text Feature Walk over…

Despite the heavy reliance on textbooks in college courses, research indicates that college students enrolled in first-year science courses are not proficient at comprehending informational text. The present study investigated a reading comprehension questioning strategy with origins in clinical research based in elaboration interrogation theory,…

In this article, I examine developments in research on achievement motivation and comment on how those developments are reflected in Wittrock's generative model of learning. Specifically, I focus on the roles of prior knowledge, the generation of knowledge, and beliefs about ability. Examples from Wittrock's theory and from current motivational…

A teaching team of three teachers aims to prepare students for 21st Century Learning Outcomes, which includes critical thinking, problem solving, and communication skills. Yet classroom experience has taught them that one of the most difficult aspects of teaching young children is that they have few experiences or prior knowledge to make sense of…

This study examined the interrelationship between tenth-grade students' problem solving ability (PSA) and their domain-specific knowledge (DSK) as well as reasoning skills (RS) in a secondary school of Taiwan. The PSA test was designed to emphasize students' divergent-thinking ability (DTA) and convergent-thinking ability (CTA) subscales in the…

This study examines the process by which a teacher may be able to answer a question asked in the classroom by using a scientific approach and a simple activity. This article examines a discussion of the question "Is space light or dark?" Priority in the discussion has been given to determining students' preconceptions about the interaction of…

This article presents what is possibly the first English translation of a 1930 manuscript related to Vygotsky's work (probably written by Vygotsky himself). This manuscript, the Zalkind Summary, is a five-point summary of his presentation to the First All-Union Congress on the Study of Human Behaviour in Leningrad in January 1930. This article…

While research has documented the key role of monitoring processes during hypermedia learning, limited empirical research has used process data to examine the possibility that these processes mediate the relationship between motivational constructs (such as self-efficacy) and cognitive factors (such as prior domain knowledge) with hypermedia…

This article discusses the key features of the common European framework for work-based learning (WBL) of the "Developing European Work Based Learning Approaches and Methods" (DEWBLAM) project (2003-2006). It examines the context of recent European initiatives and comments on the potential implications for policy, practice and theory,…

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in scientific inference, statistics, and machine learning. It is also a central part of human learning, and a task that people perform remarkably well given its notorious difficulties. People can learn causal structure in various settings, from diverse forms of data: observations…