According to the 23rd Annual Report to Congress, U.S. Department of Education, one out of every five people in the United States has a learning disability (LD). The dropout rate among these students is high, and students with learning disabilities are also less likely to attend 4-year colleges and universities. Although a majority of students with…

In this dissertation I analyze the process of crafting definitions whose purpose is classification. The context I examine is undergraduate upper-division physical science majors defining and naming sub-categories of a physical phenomenon in the context of a design task over an extended period of time. The goal of the design task is one of…

This paper is an account of Aboriginal community engagement in relation to the design and development of a Project being undertaken through an Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) grant to develop Indigenous Online Cultural Teaching & Sharing (Kinship On-line Project), which is an on-line cultural education workshop based around Aboriginal…

Objective: Chronic hepatitis C infection afflicts millions of people worldwide. Although antiviral treatments are increasingly effective, many hepatitis C virus (HCV) patients avoid treatment, do not complete or respond to treatment, or have contraindications. Self-management interventions are one option for promoting behavioral changes leading to…

Critically oriented forms of discourse analysis have focused largely on oppression and injustice. Signaling a new turn in the field, scholars have called for an analytic focus on moments of liberation and agency, referring to this orientation as "positive discourse analysis" (PDA). In this research, we turn our attention to a case study of agency…

Faculty mid-career sometimes become cynical about and disengaged from their teaching. The consequences can be severe, from alienating their students in the classroom to causing faculty to abandon teaching altogether. This paper explores this vocational disconnect; and, more importantly, proposes remedies for re-energizing faculty; for helping them…

Based on a follow-up mail survey conducted in 2009, we found that structured, one-time workshops can influence and impact participant behavior change. Survey results suggest that brief workshops, staffed by key resource personnel, can have a powerful influence on participant behavior change and fill an important gap in rural drinking water…

This study investigated the impact of a one-day conservation education workshop on knowledge about and attitudes towards species of 88 students from Valle Fertil, Argentina. Immediately before and after the workshop and one year later, students (aged 12 to 16) had to identify native and introduced exotic plant and animal species as well as…

With a push for evidence-based practice in psychology (EBPP), dissemination to community mental health care providers has been occurring. Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) is one type of EBPP that is currently being trained across the United States and internationally; however, there is little research reporting on these efforts and no…

Using the setting of a writing-workshop to facilitate a deliberate process to learn computer programming, this exploratory study investigates (a) where there is a natural overlap between programming and writing through the storytelling motif, and (b) to what extent existing language arts coursework and pedagogy can be leveraged to introduce this…

In 1975 a new definition of disability, challenging the conventional medical model, was proposed by the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) and the Disability Alliance. Subsequently extended to cover all impairments, this definition considers disability to be the "disadvantage or restriction caused by a contemporary…

The Institute of Mathematical pedagogy meets annually--the theme for 2010 was: "Mathematical Friends & Relations: Recognising Structural Relationships". Here one participant documents her reflections on the experience of working with a group of mathematics educators at the Institute. The challenges, the responses--both the predictable and the…

In this "RiDE" themed edition on environmentalism, some short pieces are chosen where practitioners describe their own specific environmental practices. Zoe Svendsen and Lucy Neal point to the positives in two commissioned works ("The Trashcatchers' Carnival" and "3rd Ring Out"), underlining the importance of…

Often research on the professional development (PD) of staff is framed within a problem-based context that focuses on the PD-related problems experienced by staff. This study pursued a different approach by using the appreciative inquiry (AI) theoretical perspective to study the positive experiences of staff in respect of PD and their desire to…

This article examines the performativities of three marginalised "at risk" youth who participated in a longitudinal digital storytelling project undertaken in formal and informal settings in Singapore. Seeking to foster young people's agency, identity and multiple literacies, the three and one half year project developed a range of…