In this review essay, Jan Nespor uses three recent contributions to place-based education, Paul Theobald's "Teaching the Commons," C.A. Bowers's "Revitalizing the Commons," and David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith's edited volume "Place-Based Education in the Global Age," to examine some fundamental conceptual and practical issues in the area. One…

There has recently been significant emphasis placed on environmental education through, for example, the UN's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. Despite this, there is still considerable debate within the literature as to how the aims of environmental education can be achieved within schools. It seems likely that if there is a lack…

The structure and composite nature of a learning object is still open to interpretation. Although several theoretical studies advocate integrated approaches to the structure and aggregation level of learning objects, in practice, many content specifications, such as SCORM, IMS Content Packaging, and course authoring tools, do not explicitly state…

Objective: One suspected source of negative outcomes associated with ADHD has been deficits in executive functions. Although both psychometrically defined and self-reported executive function deficits (EFDs) have been shown to be associated with poor academic and occupational outcomes, whether these two approaches define the same individuals…

This paper discusses the reasons why the current official U.S. poverty measure is outdated and nonresponsive to many anti-poverty initiatives. A variety of efforts to update and improve the statistic have failed, for political, technical, and institutional reasons. Meanwhile, the European Union is taking a very different approach to poverty…

This study investigated the effect of acculturation on definitions and attributions towards children's school achievement. Iranian and Iranian-Canadian immigrant mothers and their upper-elementary school children were interviewed about their definitions and attributions about school success and failure. There were significant effects of…

The purpose of the Race to the Top-Early Learning Challenge (RTT-ELC) program is to improve the quality of early learning and development and close the achievement gap for children with high needs. The RTT-ELC grant competition focuses on improving early learning and development for young children by supporting States' efforts to increase the…

This case study examined a multi-college community college district in northern California in a primarily rural area, to understand how their practices compared to management best practices designed to improve student success, barriers that may exist in implementing best practices, and how the institution may improve its own practices. The problem…

Total Quality Management (TQM) is a poor fit with higher education and can only be made to fit by major reshaping either of TQM to a more appropriate methodology (and hence not TQM), or of higher education to an image of organisation that fits TQM. The paper revisits longstanding concerns about multiple aspects of TQM from a critical systems…

The paper discusses findings of a study that investigated Malawian students' meanings for some probability vocabulary. The study explores the meanings that, prior to instruction, students assign to some words that are commonly used in teaching probability. The aim is to have some insight into the meanings that students bring to the classroom. The…

This paper examines the concept of polysemy which serves as the basis of the "principled polysemy model" of spatial prepositions proposed by A. Tyler and V. Evans in a number of recent publications [Tyler, Andrea, Evans, Vyvyan, 2001. Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks: The case of "over". Language 77, 724-765;…

The field of applied behavior analysis (ABA) has increasingly come to be associated with the treatment of autism in young children. This phenomenon is largely the result of empirical research demonstrating effective treatment outcomes in this population. The same cannot be said with regard to the treatment of conditions often referred to as…

This paper is essentially a story that can be used to help students understand some of the definitions found in a standard introductory real analysis course.

Algebra teachers find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that they have to teach their students. One way to address this issue is to have teachers teach for understanding by focusing on concepts. In this article, I share how language can help uncover the core ideas that define the concept of function and share activities…

Place- and community-based education--an approach to teaching and learning that starts with the local--addresses two critical gaps in the experience of many children now growing up in the United States: contact with the natural world and contact with community. It offers a way to extend young people's attention beyond the classroom to the world as…