Helping students to improve their problems solving skills is the primary target of science teacher trainees. In modern science, for training the students, methods should be used for improving their thinking skills, making connections with events and concepts and scientific operations skills rather than information and definition giving. One of…

A common challenge in many situations of computer-supported collaborative learning is increasing the willingness of those involved to share their knowledge with other group members. As a prototypical situation of computer-supported information exchange, a shared-database setting was chosen for the current study. This information-exchange situation…

Citizens participating in contemporary socio-scientific issues (SSI) need to draw on local knowledge and personal experience. If curricular developments in the teaching of controversial SSI are to reflect contemporary notions of citizenship then the personal narrative is an indispensable instrument in bridging the gap between the local/personal…

Creativity can be broadly defined as a combination of interacting individual and environmental resources leading to the production of valuable solutions. This paper concentrates on the type of creativity that can be expressed in solving social problems. After reviewing the potentially relevant psychological and contextual variables intervening in…

In Central America the Cold War support of the elites by the United States was designed to ward off the communist threat. At the same time social and economic demands by the working and middle classes created revolutionary movements in the face of rigid and violent responses by Central American governments. Issues of social justice pervaded the…

This study focused on how democratic values and citizenship education are promoted through environmental education in Costa Rica. Data were collected through the examination of textbook and curriculum guides and interviews with classroom teachers. The qualitative study utilized Bowers' (2001) and Gruenewald's (2003) theories of eco-justice and…

Situated within a university-based content literacy course, this article considers the spaces between the curricular realities of middle school and high school classrooms, what we call the "what is," and potential alternative configurations of curriculum and instruction for these classrooms, what we call the "what could be."…

This article reports on findings from a school-based action research project with aboriginal adolescent students attending an alternative school in Canada. As a Freirean response to these marginalized students' school failures, the researcher engaged students in a critical multiliteracies approach to language and literacy learning. Based on…

This paper considers corruption in higher education in Russia as reflected in the national media, including such aspects as corruption in admissions to higher education institutions and corruption in administering the newly introduced standardized test. The major focus is on the opinions of the leading figures of the education reform as related to…

In June 2004, the American national media spent a considerable amount of airtime revisiting the events of June 1964 when three civil rights workers were murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi. On the fortieth anniversary of the murders. National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" devoted airtime to a story, "Truth and Reconciliation in…

This paper questions the perceived divide between "science" subject matter and "moral" or "ethical" subject matter. A difficulty that this assumed divide produces is that science teachers often feel that there needs to be "special treatment" given to certain issues which are of an ethical or moral nature and which are "brought into" the science…

The central aim of the present paper is to analyse the degree to which welfare problems accumulate over time and to what extent such an accumulation is related to class position and household formation. We utilize longitudinal data from the Swedish Survey of Living Conditions, following a panel that was first interviewed in 1979 and, thereafter,…

Negative self-images are a maintaining factor in social phobia. A retrospective study (Hackmann, A., Clark, D.M., McManus, F. (2000). Recurrent images and early memories in social phobia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 38, 601-610) suggested that the images may be linked to early memories of unpleasant social experiences. This preliminary study…

Theorists often take a condescending stance when speaking about the educationalization of social problems. Given their confidence with postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, the educationalization of social problems is easily perceived as a set of questionable interventions by governments into educational practices. In this essay, Bert…

This article describes the current relationship between management education in Colombia and the efforts of the management program at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB) in Medellin to reduce local poverty. The article uses the metaphor of "the bubble" to illustrate how social class, family socialization, and the current UPB…