This paper brings together the findings of a series of studies that explored the impact of curricular changes on students' approaches to learning. The findings, which were initially surprising, are confirmed by the identification of similar patterns across four different medical educational programmes within Australia and Sri Lanka. The four…

To increase student engagement, active participation, and performance, personal response systems (clickers) were incorporated into six lecture-based sections of four required courses within the Health Sciences Department major curriculum: freshman-level Anatomy and Physiology I and II, junior-level Exercise Physiology, and senior-level Human…

Student response systems are wireless devices used for engaging students. Many studies using student response systems have been conducted in larger lecture-type settings such as in colleges and universities. The purpose of this mixed methods study was to determine the effectiveness of student response systems in middle school math classrooms to…

Archive-based, historical research of materials produced during the Golden Age of Geology (1788-1840) uncovered scientific caricatures (SCs) which may serve as a unique form of knowledge representation for students today. SCs played important roles in the past, stimulating critical inquiry among early geologists and fueling debates that addressed…

This article problematises certain aspects of methodology used for speaking practice and commonly applied in contemporary language teaching classrooms. It examines these particularly with relevance to diversity in adult learning groups. The aspects under scrutiny include the use of personal information in tasks, pair and group work, target…

This study analyzed the proactive and reactive personality traits in teachers and students. These traits were interpreted with the help of the ideas and images revealed through metaphors. With the help of these metaphors, the certain imaginative categories and statements of student teachers about the teacher, the student and teacher-student…

This paper, based on ESRC-funded research work in four case study schools, explores the "pressures" to "deliver" which bear upon English secondary schools in relation to GCSE performance. It further illustrates the ways in which pressure is transformed into tactics which focus on particular students, with the effect of…

This article describes a project that studied 15 preservice teachers' perceptions of and reactions to responding to children's and young adult literature using a Ning blog. These perceptions and reactions provided insight into various practical aspects of using a social networking blog to facilitate literature response in a teacher education…

The author analyzes two texts, Gloria Whelan's "Homeless Bird" and Deborah Ellis's "Parvana's Journey", in an attempt to explain some of the problems and difficulties associated with those texts. The author examines Whelan's representations of India and finds troubling binaries associated with that text. In comparison, the…

Student response systems (SRSs) are increasingly being used in the classroom. However, there have been few well-controlled experimental evaluations to determine whether students benefit academically from these instructional tools. Additionally, comparisons of SRS with other interactive methods have not often been conducted. We compared SRS,…

How do students' conceptualize the causes of their own academic successes and failures? Taking a phenomenological approach, students identified the causes of their performance immediately following return of a graded examination. We then used factor and item analyses to organize causes that were identified by a substantial number of students into…

Each year college students in America spend approximately $5.5 billion on textbooks. With each student spending roughly $900 on books assigned by professors, are these dollars being well spent and are students receiving a fair return on their investment? More importantly, do these texts serve the integral function in the courses as described in…

This article reports findings from a qualitative (interview) study of the identity conflict experienced by five international students at a university in the south of England for whom real and perceived challenges to national self-image were shown to be unsettling. The article suggests that our cultures of origin are centrally important to our…

The objective of this quasi-experimental quantitative study was to determine if the use of a student response system, combined with an interactive whiteboard, led to increased student achievement in mathematics within a fifth grade classroom as measured by a district benchmark assessment and the annual Arizona Instrument to Measure Standards…

This study compared face-to-face and videoconference private music lessons of one saxophone and two tuba students. One value of this study is the magnitude of the data analysis. More than 28,800 frames of digital video and verbatim scripts of all lessons were analyzed for time spent engaged in sequential patterns of instruction, performance, focus…