Problem-based approaches to learning have a long history of advocating experience-based education. Psychological research and theory suggests that by having students learn through the experience of solving problems, they can learn both content and thinking strategies. Problem-based learning (PBL) is an instructional method in which students learn…

This paper presents the outcomes of a study carried out in 2001-2002 with nine postgraduate students from China, enrolled on taught master's programmes in a UK university business school. The aims of the research were to explore the development of the students' orientations to learning during their year of study in the UK, and to explore how the…

In this study, we defined and quantified the degree of cognitive conflict induced by a discrepant event from a cognitive perspective. Based on the scheme developed, we investigated the relationship between cognitive conflict and conceptual change, and the influences of students' cognitive characteristics on conflict in learning the concept of…

Though the concept of online community has been heralded as a promising tool to support teacher professional development, a robust and meaningful definition remains elusive. This review draws together research on community, teaching, and learning in traditional and online settings. Examples of current efforts in the field of online learning…

Community colleges--institutions that serve disproportionate numbers of poor, working-class, first-generation, non-traditional, and minority students--are uniquely positioned to provide liberating educational experiences to a diverse spectrum of society. Cross (2000) aptly describes the current interest in cooperative and/or collaborative learning…

In this essay, the author argues for a democratized way of developing a consciousness of differences by describing two abbreviated creative writing classroom experiences with urban sixth grade middle school students during the 2002-2003 academic year. She draws on Tony Medina's (2001) claim that poetry and writing weave people and worlds together…

A distance education system may be viewed in terms of intrapersonal and interpersonal instructional dialogues that mediate the learning and instructional resources that enable such dialogues. Instructional resources include self-instruction texts, tutorial sessions, instructor availability, Web sites, and more. This study investigated the kinds of…

This study aimed to verify the efficacy of a strategy for science learning acquisition based on contextual, metacognitive and socio-cultural perspectives, strongly linked to the paradigm of conceptual change. The teaching model we adopted is based on co-operation for the realization of scientific experiences, and included direct observation, pair…

A considerable amount of experiences in teaching object-oriented concepts using the Java language have been reported to date, some of which describe language pitfalls and concrete learning difficulties. In this paper, a number of additional issues that have been experienced as difficult for students to master, along with approaches intended to…

This study focuses on the relationship between learning styles and language learning strategies in the EFL context in China. The study presents two kinds of data: quantitative and qualitative. In the quantitative study, the subjects consisted of 187 second-year undergraduates. Two self-reported inventories, the Chinese version of MBTI-G and a…

Although the use of translation in learning a foreign language is much maligned by language teachers, translation is widely used in learners' foreign language learning process. It appears that learners often use translation as a learning strategy to comprehend, remember, and produce a foreign language. However, relatively little research attention…

Paired listening was originally developed as a research tool with the aim to understand the strategies used by L2 learners when listening to recorded speech in the target language. It offers researchers a useful combination of direct observation and verbal data, whilst avoiding the common drawbacks of subjective introspection. This paper examines…

A recent research and development project conducted at the University of the South Pacific (USP) examined how educational multimedia can be built according to the learning approaches of the region. Through interviews, questionnaires and usability tests with staff and students at USP, the research team drafted a set of recommendations for the…

This study deals with the demand of a task. A theoretical background shows the difficulty of applying the idea of demand (as established in the literature) to the data. This has been confirmed in the preliminary study of this paper, which deals with the analysis of university examinations. Some factors that affect the demand of a task have been…

By 2010, college enrollments are expected to increase by one-third, yet this growth happens at a time when colleges and universities are faced with limited or reduced funding [1]. The result is a demand for cost-effective methods of instruction like distance learning [2]. But to be successful in a distance learning environment, students must not…