Young people labelled "disadvantaged" or "at risk of social exclusion" are increasingly directed into publicly funded or NGO-based, partly privately financed projects in order to secure their desired integration into society through work or further education. In this article, we carry out a comparative analysis of youth…

Introduction: Visually impaired people in China are socially excluded in multiple ways, such as employment, social status and information access. The purpose of this study is to examine their information needs and information seeking behaviour. Method: Two ways of data collection were employed: a telephone survey with a questionnaire in the first…

Business Action Learning Tasmania's (BALT) mission is self-reliant industry development, with diverse companies co-operating to improve their profitability, develop their people and grow the local economy. This is achieved through collaborative action learning, with companies working together on projects of vital importance and sharing the…

The purpose of this study was to examine students' experiences using Facebook as a learning management system during a course. The study participants were 18 junior education faculty students attending a compulsory distance education undergraduate course delivered by the Computer Education and Instructional Technology Department at a university in…

This qualitative research aims to describe the strategies applied by female parliamentary candidates to develop empathy values to gain constituent support in the legislative general election in 2014. Research subjects comprise 12 female members of parliament from seven regencies/cities in South Kalimantan who were chosen from different…

This study sought to determine the difference in text-based negotiated interaction between non-native speakers of English (NNS-NNS) and between non-native and natives (NNS-NS) in terms of the frequency of negotiated instances, successfully resolved instances, and interactional strategy use when the dyads collaborated on Facebook. It involved 10…

Youths who have deviant and delinquent friends are more likely to engage in delinquency. Interestingly, most quantitative studies of the association between deviant peers and deviant behavior have assumed that all peer connections have similar effects. Yet, it is possible that peer influence may vary depending on the characteristics of peers.…

This longitudinal study from Grades 1 to 4 investigated (a) the extent to which children select peers based on similarity in reading skills and (b) the extent to which children are influenced by the level of their peers' reading skills. The sample consisted of 1003 Finnish children in Grades 1-4, for whom reading fluency and comprehension were…

Agriculture's negative effect on water quality has become increasingly well documented. Farmers have a range of conservation practices available, yet rate of adoption is not optimal. Extension and other agricultural stakeholders play a key role in promotion of conservation practice adoption. We used survey data to examine relationships between…

Research on social media use in education indicates that network-based connections can enable powerful teacher learning opportunities. Using a connectivist theoretical framework (Siemens, 2005), this study focuses on secondary teacher candidates (TCs) who completed, archived, and reflected upon 1-hour Twitter chats (N = 39) to explore the promise…

How can an organization help participants increase their social capital? Using data from an ethnographic study of Launch, an organization that prepares low-income students of color to attend elite boarding schools, I analyze how the organization's structures not only generate social ties among students but also stratify those ties horizontally and…

Large disparities in educational quality exist between cities and surrounding suburban school districts and are increasing between suburban districts--a trend that emerged over the past several decades and shows signs of growing. Using in-depth interviews, this study examines how children are sorted into different school districts across a…

This article presents a case study of student-initiated use of Facebook Groups in doing a team project for an online journalism course. Drawing upon the concept of affinity space and a theoretical taxonomy of asynchronous online discussion, the present study triangulates classroom observation, semi-structured student interviews, and microanalysis…

As the United Kingdom's (UK) first Ashoka U Changemaker Campus, the University of Northampton (UoN) has embarked on a strategy that embraces social enterprises. Social enterprise, innovation and entrepreneurship are key competences that have been used by the university to address social inequalities. This paper will account for the social…

This article considers in a wide perspective the crisis in the assessment of examinations in A-level English Literature and current attempts to address the problems. Examining the implications of a survey of recent reports initiated by the regulator, it argues that trying to ensure reliability merely through technological advances and changes in…