One factor underlying the use of information and communications technologies (ICT) in schools is the interest and willingness of teachers to learn and adopt these technologies in their teaching. Previous studies of geographic information systems (GIS), as one type of ICT, indicate that the lack of teacher training is one of the key barriers to…

New products continue to launch quickly but many of them are converged products. The "new product" is not a completely new thing to consumers and the basic features stay the same. As a result, the added functions or fancy design can't explain why consumers adopt the new media. Past studies have examined perceptions of innovations or user…

Teachers often have no preparation for handling the questions and conversations that arise in the classroom when discussing literature having adoption or foster care themes. Instead of relying on personal experiences or stereotypes portrayed through the media, teachers are advised to understand the developmental tasks of children from families…

This chapter proposes that the relationship between schooling, citizenship, and democracy--so often taken for granted and discussed using idealistic perspectives--is better understood when using the lens of "embodied cognition" and a focus on metaphorical and prototypical ways of thinking. Our goal is to examine the always conflictive and elusive…

A sound understanding of technology use from the learners' perspective is crucial. This study intends to contribute to our understanding on student technology use by focusing on identifying the factors that influence students' adoption of technology for learning and the relationships between these factors. Students studying at a Hong Kong…

This study seeks to extend previous research on family stress, parenting, and child adjustment to families with adopted Chinese children. In doing so, we also seek to strengthen inferences regarding the experiential underpinnings of previously obtained relationships among these variables by determining if they also occur in families where parents…

This article charts the crisis of the modern university using Bill Readings' (1996) "The University in Ruins". Readings distinguishes three principal ideas underpinning the concept of the modern university: the Kantian idea of reason, the Humboldtian idea of culture, and the technological idea of excellence. The article reviews these…

Background/Context: The open access movement has successfully drawn attention to economic and political aspects of scholarly communication through a significant body of commentary that debates the merits of open access and the potential damage it may do to scholarly publishing. Researchers within the field of education research, notably John…

As the authors stated early in their article (Machalek and Martin 2010), evolutionary ideas have been gaining traction in the work of a growing number of sociologists in recent years. Much of their thinking derives from work inspired by sociobiology. However, many sociologists are critical of and unreceptive to incorporating evolutionary biology…

Understanding reasons why students use social media has become a major preoccupation of researchers in recent time due to the rate of its adoption among the present generation of students. Some of the few study on social media phenomenon employed a single theory as a framework in order to understand the factors that influence the acceptance of it…

This study aims to identify and categorize barriers to e-learning adoption and the relative impact of those barriers on learners. It contributes to the understanding of learner perceptions of barriers, the different types of barriers and their relative importance. This study used a quantitative methodology grounded in previous literature. The…

Today, with states' near-universal adoption of the Common Core State Standards, the political system has achieved that which was not possible less than 2 decades ago. Just why this is so remains unanswered. Some observers have attributed states' embrace of the standards to the substantial financial incentives that the federal government embedded…

The concept of pedagogical content knowledge is widely distributed in science and mathematics teaching. This study aims to study how in-service science teachers react their role in the concept of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK). Five in-service science teachers participated in this study through project leader teacher to change in science and…

Background: Experience in institutional/orphanage care has been linked to increased mental health problems. Research suggests that children adopted from institutions experience specific difficulties related to inattention/overactivity. Evidence of internalizing and conduct problems relative to non-adopted peers has been found in early childhood…

Background: Previous studies have found that post-institutionalized (PI) children are particularly susceptible to attention problems and perform poorly on executive functioning (EF) lab tasks. Methods: Parent ratings of EF were examined in 288 school-age and 130 preschool-age children adopted from psychosocially depriving Russian institutions that…