Rural African classrooms are still practising discourses and pedagogies that contribute towards students' continued underachievement and marginalisation. The use of behaviourist-based pedagogical approaches and the exclusion of learners' socio-cultural experiences including their mother tongue (MT) still characterise most classroom practices. The…

A total of 575 students from the Associate Degree Foundation Program and the Associate Degree Program participated in this study. The two purposes of this study were to use the time series between/within experimental design to examine whether participation in co-curricular activities could (1) enhance student learning effectiveness and (2) have…

Using the 2008 Presidential Election as a case of curricular controversy, the author describes how six high school government teachers responded to the racial, gender, and religious diversity included on the presidential tickets of the two major political parties. Teachers had to decide whether the issue of Americans challenging the tradition of…

Teaching and learning are time-dependant processes. It can be hypothesised that the content coherence during a teaching sequence is an important factor of learning. In this perspective, it is of great interest to follow the occurrences of a notion and the development of its meanings in the classroom discourse, all along the various sessions of a…

The communication pattern of Initiation/Response/Follow-Up (IRF) has long been an important instructional sequence in language classrooms. When language teachers combine IRF with the Response to Intervention (RTI) approach, they create a powerful model to evaluate student oral practice and self-assess effectiveness in creating language communities…

Teachers' classroom management approach varies depending on several factors such as the social, psychological, cultural and educational status of the student, classroom level, the physical conditions of the school, organization structure. There are different approaches in classroom management. These approaches are gathered under three headings in…

This study compares teachers' language use and covert language attitudes in primary and secondary state education in Cyprus. The Ministry of Education and Culture encourages the systematic use of Standard Modern Greek in the formal learning environment of the classroom. Yet, our class observations and teacher interviews demonstrate that the Greek…

How instructors communicate with their students impacts their students' instructional attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. Verbal aggression in the classroom often leads to negative instructional and relational outcomes (Infante, 1995; Myers, 2001; Myers & Knox, 2000; Myers & Rocca, 2001). This study investigated whether verbally aggressive…

This case study aimed to determine the nature of student interactions in small groups in an elementary classroom utilizing the Science Writing Heuristic approach. Fifth grade students were audio-recorded over four units of study while working in small groups to generate knowledge claims after conducting student-directed investigations. Analysis…

The theory and lessons of knowledge exchange, in both a physical and virtual environment, suggest a framework for understanding the specific requirements for a digital design class in "Second Life". Through teaching and observing students who were asked to complete a machinima project, our research provided examples of the strengths and…

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's Carnival theory, this article focuses on specific outcomes of a research project the author undertook in Hong Kong, where drama pedagogy has been recently introduced into the official curriculum. It investigates the ways in which laughter, noise, jokes, frolic and popular literacies commonly appear in classrooms where…

The research project presented in this article was designed to provide a better understanding of the stable and significant differences in the PISA results between two otherwise very similar Nordic welfare states, Denmark and Finland. In the PISA studies, Finnish students repeatedly achieve the highest Nordic (and partly worldwide) scores in e.g.…

The role of classroom discussions in comprehension and learning has been the focus of investigations since the early 1960s. Despite this long history, no syntheses have quantitatively reviewed the vast body of literature on classroom discussions for their effects on students' comprehension and learning. This comprehensive meta-analysis of…

Word finding difficulties in children are typically characterized by search behaviours such as silence, circumlocution, repetition, and empty words. Yet, how children's word searches are constructed (including gesture, gaze, and prosody) and the actions accomplished during interaction have not yet been researched. In this study, 8-year-old Ciara…

The goal of this article is to present a sketch of what, following the German social theorist Arnold Gehlen, may be termed "sensuous cognition." The starting point of this alternative approach to classical mental-oriented views of cognition is a multimodal "material" conception of thinking. The very texture of thinking, it is suggested, cannot be…