One of the major purposes of many intercultural communication textbooks is to help students recognize, accept, and appreciate cultural differences. However, one often lacks the necessary motivation to get to know and learn about individuals of a different cultural heritage. Thus, misunderstanding, stereotyping, prejudice, or even racism may…

In 1998 the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching initiated a comprehensive study of professional education in the United States. By focusing on the interactions of teachers and students in the classroom and other formal and informal educational settings, the foundation hoped to discover how clergy, lawyers, engineers, doctors, and…

This article describes the preferences expressed by 16-year-old and 17-year-old boys when they were asked what they want to learn from sex and relationship education classes and how they want to be taught. Research was carried out in eight secondary schools with boys in year 12. Qualitative responses from questionnaires issued to 307 boys were…

Joyce VanTassel-Baska is the Executive Director of the Center for Gifted Education and the Jody and Layton Smith Professor of Education at the College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. For the past 20 years, the Integrated Curriculum Model, based on research of what works with gifted learners, has been the foundation of curriculum…

This article details what happened when, after endless hours of teaching and explaining how literature circles work, the authors were dismayed at how their students still struggled to have positive social interactions during book discussions. Book discussions often deteriorated into tension filled discussions marred by class inequities, bullying,…

Seeking the best pedagogical practices for bilingual higher education and guided by the principles of the sheltered instruction observation protocol (SIOP), we describe a sub-study of the Sheltered Instruction Research Project (SIRP) which deals with how professors at ÚNICA college in Bogotá, Colombia implement one of the components of the model:…

In Finland teaching of technology has traveled a long road during its 140-year history. It has gradually gone from the copying of the model series dating back to the 1860s to the building of computer controlled robots. Materials, techniques and technology have developed wildly but the pedagogic contents are restricted regrettably still often only…

Reading in mathematics classrooms needs to be an active part of the learning process. If it continues to be viewed as a passive way to gain information, then its benefit to the learning process will also continue to be under-utilised. The "Read--Think--Do (x2)" model, designed by these authors and described in this article, can be a support to…

The authors argue that imitation is a flexible and adaptive learning mechanism in that children do not always reproduce all of the details they can from a demonstration. Instead, they vary their replications depending on their interpretation of the situation. Specifically, the authors propose that when children do not understand the overall reason…

Podcast is a digital recording of a radio broadcast or similar program made available on the Internet for downloading to a personal audio player. In other words, it's a digital audio file that is created, shared, and heard. The podcast is a viable alternative for delivering research content or lessons to students who need remedial or extended…

This paper describes an assignment that gives students the ability to improve written and verbal communication abilities, which they will be using throughout their lives, by enhancing communication skills and competencies in a class setting. It is a two-part assignment that begins with a discussion on how to produce a successful cover letter and…

The research presented in this paper consisted of an investigation of the effectiveness of a four-step constructivist-based teaching activity on student understanding of how pressure and temperature influence the dissolution of a gas in a liquid. Some 44 Grade 9 students (18 boys and 26 girls) selected purposively from two school classes in the…

Warns of the pitfalls in rigid performance-based teacher education programs by discussing: (1) the goals teacher education should include; (2) the dangers inherent in "teaching to the test" evaluation procedures, and learning models based on behaviorist theories, and (3) the "true" role of accountability in our educational system. (ED)

The teaching profession is encouraged to retreat from the search for one method of instruction and to recognize that there are many factors which lead to success in modern language learning. Several models offering different approaches for organizing classroom instruction are suggested. (Author/PMP)