It is widely acknowledged that China is much wealthier than ever before. However, many have witnessed rising cases of moral disorders and the inefficiency of school-based moral education. As one of the most widely known theoretical frameworks in the social sciences, Bronfenbrenner's bio-ecological systems theory of human development can provide an…

First language acquisition is implicit, in that explicit information about the language structure to be learned is not provided to children. Instead, they must acquire both vocabulary and grammar incrementally, by generalizing across multiple situations that eventually enable links between words in utterances and referents in the environment to be…

We language educators are constant learners of teaching, not only of up-to-date pedagogy and technology but also the social context of target and native culture within which teaching occurs. Beyond my formal education, integral to my knowledge base are the range of student populations I have served and the variety of language teaching contexts I…

A growing concern for online course learning is to what extent learners are concentrated and self-regulated when they are isolated from their classmates and instructors. To address this issue, this study collected both quantitative and qualitative data from a sample of 580 Chinese university learners from varied majors, who were taking online…

There is a contradiction in the literature about the effect of REACT strategy on science achievement. This study aims to resolve this contradiction by determining the effect of REACT strategy on student science achievement and the factors affecting this strategy by integrating findings obtained from both qualitative and quantitative studies. The…

This article reports on findings of an online survey of teacher librarians about their instructional work, approaches, and roles and how these aspects of their teaching have changed over time. Academic librarians who had at least one year of library teaching experience and who had been actively involved in library instruction within the past two…

How organizations (re)produce inequality is of premiere importance to sociologists. Higher education is one institution with many types of organizations (i.e., colleges and universities) ripe for sociological examination of unequal systems. Although an appreciable body of work examines racism in higher education, the effects of heterosexism in…

In this dissertation, I examine STEM fields' academic and occupational contexts in relation to the post-baccalaureate trajectories of US college graduates. In three empirical chapters focusing on STEM doctorate fields, STEM occupational fields, and these fields' changes over time, respectively, I pay particular attention to three demographic…

Is public housing bad for children? Critics charge that public housing projects concentrate poverty and create neighborhoods with limited opportunities, including low-quality schools. However, whether the net effect is positive or negative is theoretically ambiguous and likely to depend on the characteristics of the neighborhood and schools…

The patient portal is an electronic repository of health information, including doctor's notes, laboratory test results, and diagnostic imaging reports. There are limited studies that explore how individuals make sense of their health information, and use that understanding to increase health literacy. Education leaders should consider the ways…

Since the country's democratization in 1950, the Nepali education system has undergone 12 reform cycles. These reforms have been influenced by international policies emerging from the Millennium Development Goals and the subsequent Sustainable Development Goals. They have instigated an increasing shift toward Westernized pedagogical practices,…

According to grounded cognition, words whose semantics contain sensory-motor features activate sensory-motor simulations, which, in turn, interact with spatial responses to produce grounded congruency effects (e.g., processing the spatial feature of "up" for sky should be faster for up vs. down responses). Growing evidence shows these…

In this commentary on the papers in the special issue, I discuss how many of the standard questions and debates in the field of creativity research tend to focus on the individual creator. The welcome recent resurgence of interest in questions of context, interaction, culture, and audience--as on full display in this special issue--is cause to…

Background: A long-standing premise in test design is that contextualizing test items makes them concrete, less demanding, and more conducive to determining whether students can apply or transfer their knowledge. Purpose: We assert that despite decades of study and experience, much remains to be learned about how to construct effective and fair…

Language is a magical key that human beings hold in their hands to open the door of communication. To succeed in communication, formal links are one of the aspects of language that need to be known and used in discourse in addition to the contextual factors (Cook, 1992). Hence, systematic exposure to them is essential for satisfactory language…