For decades, teacher educators and others have looked critically at the way teachers are initially prepared and during the last ten years the calls for reform in teacher education have become even more frequent. Some programs have responded to those demands and made substantial and long lasting changes. This qualitative study reports on data…

The pendulum is shifting from teacher-directed approaches in childhood education towards child-directed learning where developmentally appropriate practices (DAP) inform curriculum and instruction. This study explored the perspectives of teachers and administrators towards the supports and barriers of DAP and play in Transitional Kindergarten (TK)…

Epistemic beliefs are individuals' beliefs about the nature of knowledge, how knowledge is constructed, and how knowledge can be justified. This study employed a mixed-methods approach to examine: (a) middle and high school students' self-reported epistemic beliefs (quantitative) and epistemic beliefs revealed from practice (qualitative) during a…

Since 1999, the National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES), conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) in the Institute of Education Sciences, has collected nationally representative data that can be used to estimate the number of homeschooled students in the United States. This report…

This volume represents current and futuristic thinking of seminal rural education researchers, with the goal of providing perspectives and directions to inform the work of rural education research, practice, and policy. With an emphasis on leveraging collaboration among key rural education stakeholders, this title both outlines our current…

Many philosophers believe that if "S" is an unambiguous, context-sensitive, declarative sentence and "p" is a proposition asserted (without conversational implicatures) by a literal utterance of "S" in a context "c," then "p" is fully determined by the linguistic meaning of "S" in…

Semantic Minimalism is a position about the semantic content of declarative sentences, i.e., the content that is determined entirely by syntax. It is defined by the following two points: "Point 1": The semantic content is a complete/truth-conditional proposition. "Point 2": The semantic content is useful to a theory of…

How does learning to categorize objects affect how people visually perceive them? Behavioral, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging studies have tested the degree to which category learning influences object representations, with conflicting results. Some studies have found that objects become more visually discriminable along dimensions relevant…

Context specificity of rats' conditioned taste aversion as a function of context experience was assessed in two experiments. Rats received a single pairing between a flavor X and a LiCl injection in a distinctive context (context A) being subsequently tested either in the same context or in a different but equally familiar context (context B).…

In this commentary, Rosita Ulate Sanchez states that Venezuela, like other Latin American countries, begins the 21st century by confronting realities that require changes in its learning and education systems. The purpose of Venezuela's education system is to generate social renovation and economic development. It seeks to achieve this through…

Eye and head movements evoked in response to obvious visual attention shifts. However, there has been little progress on the causes of absent-mindedness so far. The paper proposes an attention awareness system that captures the conditions regarding the interaction of eye gaze and head pose under various attentional switching in computer classroom.…

In this commentary, the common themes from the interesting articles in this special section of "Developmental Psychology" are considered as they illuminate the potential ontogenetic sources of the conscientiousness-well-being-longevity interconnections that have emerged in recent research. In particular, consideration is given to the…

The descriptive focus of conversation analysis (CA) has not been considered optimal for second language (L2) acquisition research. Recently, however, some CA researchers have addressed the developmental agenda by examining longitudinal data (e.g., Brouwer, C., 2004; Ishida, M., 2009; Markee, N., 2008; Pekarek-Doehler, S., 2010). The present…

The teaching of Physiology is indispensable in many biological and health disciplines. Physiology is one of the major components of the curriculum in a number of life science courses, including the study of life, cells, tissues, and organisms as well as their functions. A bigger challenge for physiology teachers is to make physiological concepts…

The main objective of this research is to investigate efficiency of use of supplementary video content in multimedia teaching. Integrating video clips in multimedia lecture presentations may increase students' perception of important information and motivation for learning. Because of that, students can better understand and remember key points of…