Includes "Maintaining and Monitoring Quality for Women Learners in Higher Education" (Rivis); "Women, Quality and Further Education" (Moss); "Quality Issues in Informal Women's Education in the Voluntary Sector" (Scarlett, Winner); "Women in Adult Basic Education" (Thompson); "Investors in People"…

Analyzes conditions that have led to an increase in private and collective educational initiatives in Algeria, highlighting political and socioeconomic changes since 1988. Indicates that after a long period of a public education monopoly, social factors have led to the development of alternative educational opportunities that are more responsive…

Two fourth-grade classes served in a study that employed computers for promoting autonomous learning processes through solving challenging problems adapted to students' aptitudes using the number line as an intuitive model. Findings showed that students have preinstructional intuitions and informal knowledge of negative numbers. (24 references)…

Describes the Nuffield project that served as a resource for science centers across England and as a vehicle for the European Collaborative for Science, Industry, and Technology Exhibitions. Discusses the network of contacts extending from the BBC and British Association to science centers worldwide following the inception of the project by the…

Describes development of a rural Guatemalan women's organization created to respond to the psychological, economic, and educational consequences of long-term war, massacre, military occupation, poverty, and exile. The association's genesis and current work reflect collaborative processes of interethnic and transnational nonformal education,…

Contrary to pervasive assumptions about the need for lifelong learning, U.S. and Canadian adults' collective learning efforts far outpace workplace requirements. Underemployment has several dimensions: the talent-use gap, structural unemployment, involuntary reduced employment, credential gap, performance gap, and subjective underemployment.…

Year Eight students that underwent novelty-reducing pre-orientation to the physical environment of an interactive science museum and had prior experience visiting the museum learned more than their counterparts. Those exhibits most frequently recalled shared a combination of characteristics such as large physical size, prominence in the exhibit…

Deplores inconsistencies between the realities of today's technologically driven, information-age world and the static, constraining boxes in which state-initiated, accountability- focused reforms hold American education. We must reconceptualize schooling, curriculum content, time, grade levels, and achievement to allow more informal,…

Written while the author was a high school senior, this piece discusses the value of the combination of emotional lessons, those in patience, appreciation and reflection, along with traditional school lessons in order to make an unbelievably educational and worthwhile adventure. (BF)

Literacy education is at a crossroads. While traditional school experiences still prize disembodied experiences of reading print-based texts as the pinnacle of sound education, informal learning experiences provide fruitful examples of the ways that visual texts are read as they are embodied by readers. In this paper I draw from the literacy lives…

Increasingly the different ways in which learning can be conceptualised alongside debates within the field of human resource development (HRD) regarding its nature and purpose, potentially lead to confusion regarding how learning is to be assessed in the workplace. This article identifies some of the complexities associated with assessing learning…

This paper assesses university students' acquisition of simple and complex knowledge, in exploring whether the knowledge gap hypothesis (KGH) with its origins in community-based research into people's informal learning from mass media, provides insights into students' acquisition and retention of information. The KGH posits that attempts to…

Since 1988, the author and his colleague Stephan Bladh, from the Malmo Academy of Music, have followed the student teachers that started their music teacher education that autumn (Bladh, 2002; Bouij 1998a). They started their research project with 169 hopeful students. The music teacher education program was then four years long, but some of the…

This article reports on the performance of reception-aged, home-educated children. Media reports tend to focus on older home-educated children withdrawing from school but very little is known about younger children many of whom have never been to school. This research sought insight into the learning experience of these young children. The study…

Interest in prior learning recognition among Canadian adults is estimated on the basis of a large-scale national survey and illustrated by an account of the development of a prior learning assessment centre and the individual experiences of participants. Both the common principles and the distinctive activities that characterise the prior learning…