This article articulates the results of an ongoing study in an urban school in New York City in which student and teacher researchers engage in practices that support the science success of the schools' predominantly Latino/a and African American population. By situating the study in the nature of corporate and communal practices, the article…

In this paper, experiments on the automatic discrimination of basic emotions from spoken Finnish are described. For the purpose of the study, a large emotional speech corpus of Finnish was collected; 14 professional actors acted as speakers, and simulated four primary emotions when reading out a semantically neutral text. More than 40 prosodic…

The issue of parental choice of school for their child has been a topical one in many contexts worldwide, and work has been undertaken in a number of national contexts to investigate the many factors at work in influencing such choice. This article considers parental choice within the specific context of bilingual (Spanish/English) schools in…

Factors related to students' selection of Internet-assisted vs. traditional distance learning environments (IDL vs. TDL) at the Open University of Israel were investigated. The two groups differed in their demographic variables, academic achievements and value priorities. The IDL group had a higher percentage of males, and a different age…

Although feeding difficulties in infants with Down syndrome are described in the literature, the experiences of parents regarding the feeding problems of their infants are largely omitted. In order to promote closer collaboration with families and speech-language therapists in early communication intervention, the study investigated some…

The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. Particularly, applications should be able to provide individually optimized access to information by taking the individual needs and requirements of the users into account. In this paper we propose a…

Nine-ten-and twelve-year-old children (N = 75) read aloud dominant, subordinate or ambiguous bias sentences (N = 120) that ended in a homonym (BALL). After the sentence (1,000 ms), children read aloud targets that were related to the dominant (BAT) or subordinate (DANCE) meaning of the homonym or control targets. Participants were also divided…

This paper presents the multimedia product for teaching Natural Sciences to 10-12 years old children. In this product three pedagogical agents, Teacher and two pupils guide the learner through the virtual environment. The inclusion of a team of pedagogical agents permits us to create a micro-model of lesson activity and gives a reliable support of…

Objective: This study explored challenges and barriers that need to be addressed in a preprofessional educational setting to provide opportunities for boundary spanning that leads to family-centred interdisciplinary service provision. Design: The design employed in this study was participatory action research, an inductive approach. Setting: The…

The use of children's literature in urban social studies classrooms to facilitate students' engagement in literate behaviors and simultaneously develop a framework for understanding social action is an under-researched area. This paper discusses the use of literature for children and young adults in an urban middle school language arts and social…

Our research is concerned with the observation of communication between the child and his parents (mother-baby vs. father-baby). The children are aged from 30 to 36 months old. Communication was analysed according to utterances functions and social aims. 14 French children, 7 boys and 7 girls were filmed with each of their two parents in their…

The media landscape in urban India has changed so rapidly in the past 10 years that it is not easy to consider the ways in which these changes interact with people's lives and beliefs. Apocalyptic pronouncements about the ways in which MTV-style television, films and the Internet are destroying "genuine" Indian culture by promoting…

English language learners (ELLs) with disabilities are an emerging population in the U.S. and therefore command special attention in assessment systems. Research has demonstrated that "universal design of assessment" approaches are effective in helping to make assessments more accessible for ELLs with disabilities. Special education…

This paper is a reconsideration of the nature of teaching and learning in the language teacher education course room. Drawing broadly on sociocultural perspectives of Lave and Wenger and Vygotskian models of cognitive apprenticeship, it considers how to design the course room as a learning environment. It begins with a critique of…

This paper summarizes the assessment results of the Language Online project at Carnegie Mellon University. The study investigated the effectiveness of online language courses for students' learning outcomes in four hybrid online language courses (elementary and intermediate levels) and their counterpart conventional (offline) courses from Spring…