Professional bureaucracies of the Finnish municipal services are challenged by many modernization pressures manifested currently in the form of New Public Management. Along with efficiency demands the new emphasis is on the provision of client-oriented services by the means of multi-professional teamwork crossing the traditional sector boundaries.…

All too often, a community undergoing a community development process is relegated to the role of audience to outsiders' expertise. Community members are asked to furnish token "representation" of the residents' point of view and once they have been represented are asked to approve what the outsiders say is in their best interest. This dynamic is…

In the renewed "Primary Framework for Mathematics" for England, great emphasis is given to calculation and its prerequisites (DfES, 2006). Expectations are increased for calculations and the recall of number facts, with mental calculation owning a higher profile, while progression in written calculation is clarified. The greater focus on…

Vocabulary growth was suggested to prompt the implementation of increasingly finer-grained lexical representations of spoken words in children (e.g., [Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). "Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading…

This study explores whether the development of students' understanding of matter as something that occupies space and has weight involves conceptual change and restructuring rather than only simple belief revision. Based on an analysis of how the concepts in students' initial matter theory (henceforth MT1) may differ from the concepts in the…

This paper reports the findings of a pilot study which adopted an ethnographic approach to investigate the cultural features of the Chinese kindergarten curriculum by means of "semi-participant" observations, semi-structured interviews, daily conversations and open-ended questionnaires in two Chinese kindergartens. The paper first…

To make sense of and learn about work environments, people actively construct their own knowledge and share stories of their experience. Telling stories is particularly challenging in a transient organization where people are hired on a voluntary, temporary basis. Such is the case of a nonprofit music festival organization in Sweden, which is…

Play is children's work. Alice Honig enumerates from the heart 10 ways in which children learn through play, including building dexterity; social skills; cognitive and language skills; number and time concepts; spatial understanding; reasoning of cause and effect; clarification of pretend versus real; sensory and aesthetic appreciation; extended…

The aim of this study was to determine whether the addition of interactivity to a computer-based learning package enhances the learning process. A sample of 33 (22 male and 11 female) undergraduates on a Business and Management degree used a multimedia system to learn about the operation of a bicycle pump. The system consisted of a labelled…

In the last decades there has been an increasing interest in vocabulary learning strategies given that they are found to facilitate second/foreign language vocabulary learning and recall. As many learners do not develop sufficient mastery of the strategy repertoire, explicit instruction on vocabulary learning strategies may help them to become…

The prefrontal cortex of the primate frontal lobes provides the capacity for judgment which can constantly adapt behavior in order to optimize its outcome. Adjudicating between long-term memory programs and prepotent responses, this capacity reviews all incoming information and provides an interpretation dependent on the events that have just…

In the field of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), scripts are designed to support collaboration among distant learners or co-present learners whose interactions are (at least partially) mediated by a computer. The rationale of scripts is to structure collaborative learning processes in order to trigger group interactions that may…

Karen Orr Vered demonstrates how children's media play contributes to their acquisition of media literacy. Theorizing after-school care as intermediary space, a large-scale ethnographic study informs this theory-rich and practical discussion of children's media use beyond home and classroom.

Mindfulness is ongoing scrutiny of existing expectations, continuous refinement of those expectations based on new experiences, appreciation of the subtleties of context, and identification of novel aspects of context that can improve foresight and functioning. This concept of mindfulness has been studied in the domain of business and in relation…

This descriptive study identifies the thinking and learning skills--such as good decision-making strategies and monitoring one's own learning progress--that students should acquire, as described in standards documents from state departments of education, from national subject-area organizations, and from organizations concerned about adequate…