Like their students, teachers may hold a variety of naïve conceptions that have been hypothesized to limit their ability to support students' learning. This study examines whether changes in elementary students' conceptions are related to their teachers' content knowledge, attitudes, and understanding of conceptual change. The study…

One of the challenges experienced by students of instructional design is eliciting user participation when designing and developing products for course or program projects, particularly over multiple cycles of evaluation. Student projects do not normally have budgets to engage recruitment companies or provide participant incentives. This paper…

Self-assembly is the fundamental but counterintuitive principle that explains how ordered biomolecular complexes form spontaneously in the cell. This study investigated the impact of using two external representations of virus self-assembly, an interactive tangible three-dimensional model and a static two-dimensional image, on student learning…

Online courses are growing at a tremendous rate, and although we have discovered a great deal about teaching and learning in the online environment, there is much left to learn. One variable that needs to be explored further is procrastination in online coursework. In this mixed methods study, quantitative methods were utilized to evaluate the…

As the shortage of special education teachers has led to increasing numbers of teacher candidates enrolled in alternative certification programs, there is a need to provide systematic mentoring and coaching. The relationship between support providers and novice teachers enrolled in an alternative certification program in a diverse, urban…

This mixed method study examined the effectiveness of experiential learning opportunities near the end of the occupational therapy students' didactic education. A pretest/posttest design with a gain score approach was used to determine whether there was a significant improvement in the occupational therapy students' self-perception of their…

Most educators are aware that some students utilize web-based machine translators for foreign language assignments, however, little research has been done to determine how and why students utilize these programs, or what the implications are for language learning and teaching. In this mixed-methods study we utilized surveys, a translation task,…

The Canadian population is aging; many are rapidly advancing towards the age of normal retirement (Miner, 2010). The demographics for Ontario colleges are similar; in 2009, 70 percent of administrators and faculty were baby boomers, and 40 percent of the workforce in the college sector was eligible for retirement (OCASA, 2009). In 2010, there were…

Expectations for higher education providers to produce graduates ready for the workplace have shaped provision, with the introduction of the Foundation Degree, and expectations of an employability component within higher education programmes. This paper reports on an intervention for three groups of foundation degree students, which introduces…

Using mixed-methods approaches and cross-case analysis procedures of a study of 10 teacher-preparation programs across the United States, researchers identified signature aspects of the programs that captured key elements unique to each institution and compared teacher candidate perceptions of learning with the expressed intentions of the faculty.…

Background: Early sexual activity can undermine adolescents' future school success and health outcomes. The purpose of this study was to assess the role of a family homework component of a comprehensive sex education intervention in delaying sexual initiation for early adolescents and to explore what social and contextual factors prevent…

University environments are fertile grounds for risky sexual behaviors. This study investigated students' risky sexual practices at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa. Data were collected using quantitative and qualitative methods. A total of 1,405 questionnaires were administered, and 80 in-depth interviews and four focus…

This mixed methods sequential explanatory study utilized the Multi-factor Leadership Questionnaire, responses to open-ended questions, and in-depth interviews to identify transformational leadership qualities that were present among principals in Alberta, Canada. The first quantitative phase consisted of a random sample of 135 schools (with…

The purpose of this research was to explore how technology can be used to teach technological skills and to determine what benefit "flipping" the classroom might have for students taking an introductory-level college course on spreadsheets in terms of student achievement and satisfaction with the class. A pretest posttest…

A mixed research design was used to examine how deaf students used the visual resources of a multimedia software package that was designed to support reading comprehension. The viewing behavior of 8 deaf students, ages 8-12 years, was recorded during their interaction with multimedia software that included narrative texts enriched with Greek Sign…