Emergency and conflict in countries such as Syria, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan have made us more aware of the long-term serial disruption and psychosocial damage faced by people caught up in emergency and conflict areas. Open, distance and flexible learning (ODFL) has sometimes been employed in these regions to maintain a degree of…

The author reviews various elements of what may be considered as evidence that the long-awaited shift in the education paradigm is actually happening. Concepts like student-centered learning, attainment-based evaluation, knowledge-based constructivism, and effort-based intelligence are growing, are being more widely recognized as important, and…

This study explored the impact of a learner-centered, mid-semester course evaluation process called the small group instructional diagnosis (SGID) on student perceptions of dimensions of teaching that promote effective learning. Classes where instructors requested the SGID were randomly assigned to either traditional or learner-centered SGIDs and…

Personal competencies--cognitive, metacognitive, motivational, and social/emotional--are applied by students in learning (mastery of knowledge and skills). These competencies are both acquired through learning and applied in the learning process. Personalized learning--a promising approach to education made practical by advances in…

In the last 15 years there has been little research about the design of resident assistant (RA) training programs in higher education (Bowman & Bowman, 1995, 1998; Wesolowski, Bowman, & Adams, 1996). A RA is an enrolled student who is selected, trained, and supervised to serve as a part-time, paraprofessional employee for a housing and/or…

This study defines and explores pedandragogy as a teaching and learning model using a southern university in the United States of America as a case study. It examines its applicability to a multiplicity of academic disciplines, testing the attitudes of faculty towards the implementation of the learner-centered approach in higher education.…

A UK East Midlands urban infant (four to seven years) school is working to design, implement and evaluate a new pedagogy across all three year groups in the school. The focus is on the implementation of a negotiated progressive skills matrix, centred on continuous and enhanced provision and on creating high-quality interactions between adults and…

Recent research suggests that clickers (electronic feedback devices) influence metacognition. This article reports qualitative findings from a quasi-experimental study comparing clickers and low technology polling. We sought to establish how clickers influence metacognition and whether differences exist in how each response system influences…

Technology has become embedded in all aspects of students' lives as they increasingly rely on mobile technology devices such as cell phones to access and share information. Cell phones function as portable, affordable, and ubiquitous mini-computers, yet few teachers have leveraged the benefits of cell phone technology for teaching and learning…

Student-centred learning has gradually come to the foreground of the Bologna Process. In parallel, learning outcomes have been advocated as key degree descriptors, illustrative of student-centred approaches. This paper examines learning outcomes in their diverse understandings and enactment in three European countries--England, Portugal and…

The art of teaching freshmen students is undergoing a rapid paradigm change. Classical forms of teaching are not applicable any more and an unmanageable offer of new multimedia tools and concepts is glutting the market. Moreover, compared to previous courses, the class size triples. In view of these challenges, we implemented a new teaching…

Background/Context: Billions of dollars are spent annually on professional development (PD) for educators, yet few randomized controlled trials (RCT) have demonstrated the ultimate impact PD has on student learning. Further, while policymakers and others speak to the role schools should play in developing students' civic awareness, RCTs of PD…

We used population-based, longitudinal data to investigate the relation between mathematics instructional practices used by first-grade teachers in the United States and the mathematics achievement of their students. Factor analysis identified four types of instructional activities (i.e., teacher-directed, student-centered,…

This paper presents the framework of an intensive programme (IP) organised by UNESCO and addressed to young graduate professionals to prepare them for a career in fields related to sustainability. The aims of the IP were to address participants' environmental awareness and to develop attitudes and skills related to environmental planning and…

New approaches to emergent learner-directed learning design can be strengthened with a theoretical framework that considers learning as a dynamic process. We propose an approach that models a learning process using a set of spatial concepts: learning space, position of a learner, niche, perspective, step, path, direction of a step and step…