Portfolio assessment of teaching practice was first introduced into the University of Botswana's Faculty of Education in May 2010. This study sought to investigate the impact of this innovative new professional development/assessment system on the professional growth and development of in-service teachers. The findings of the study suggest that…

This thesis explored the history of calculator usage in mathematics classrooms in the United States since 1975 with a focus on the attitudes of parents, educators, and national organizations. The influence of historical events, people, organizations, research, and trends was explored in depth. Studying the changes that calculators have brought to…

College completion remains one of the most compelling and vexing policy issues in higher education today. Although access to higher education has increased substantially over the past three decades, student success in college as measured by degree completion has not improved significantly. There is a great disparity in the percentage of low-income…

This article presents student perceptions about different types of web-based activities used to seek information for French language learning. Group interviews were conducted with 71 students in five Canadian universities to elicit data on their use of the Internet for information-seeking activities. These students use the Web for three main…

Social movements at universities have recently flourished as a response to the Bologna Process and austerity measures at universities, but studies on learning within these movements are still scarce. Our goal is to describe one movement which started at the University of Gdansk in 2009 and aimed at democratising the university and implementing…

This article addresses the interface between environmental and humane education, as a theoretical and practical emerging field in Brazil. We begin by presenting conceptual similarities that, in our view, underpin and justify the need for a growing connection between the two fields of research and educational practice. We then describe an…

This exploratory study describes a framework for data-driven learning (DDL), in General (non-major) English university classes, in which learners "construct" linguistic corpora instead of merely "consulting" them. Prior related work has addressed the needs of language specialists, in particular trainee translators who are…

Recent research in learning technologies has demonstrated many promising contributions from the use of ontologies and semantic web technologies for the development of advanced learning environments. In spite of those benefits, ontology development and maintenance remain the key research challenges to be solved before ontology-enhanced learning…

The study investigated the importance of two elements in the process of syllabus design (ends / means specifications, program implementation) in the faculty of Islamic and Arabic studies, Nile Valley University, designed in 1995. Results indicate that the ends/means specifications stage is used to present the general aims and the objective of each…

In recent years, the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act has increasingly had a major impact on daily decisions in schools, especially for principals' performance. Depending on the accountability rating, schools are in jeopardy of closing, and principals and teachers are at risk of being fired (McGhee & Nelson, 2005). As a result, it is…

Adolescence is a time of growth, change, and confusion for young women. During this transition from childhood to adulthood, sex and gender roles become more important. Meanwhile, depictions of females--from the hyper-sexualized girls of music videos to the chaste repression of Purity Balls--send mixed messages to young women about their bodies…

This study employed an ethnographic perspective to generate a grounded theory that contributes to the understanding of financial leadership practice in four elementary school contexts: Non Title I School, Title I School, Empowerment School and Charter School. The literature, interviews, observations, document analysis, and review of relevant…

This study examines the first time publishing experience of non-native English speaking doctoral students at three public universities in Hong Kong. The purpose was to gain an understanding of the perceptions of Hong Kong non-native English speaking doctoral students as writers of journal articles, their difficulties in getting papers published in…

Identifying persistent media frames through a cognitive media analysis is an important step in the empirical measurement of public thinking about social issues. Based on a recent media analysis of racial disparities as they pertain to youth in major U.S. newspapers, this article explains three frames that were persistently evoked in media coverage…

In this study, the authors investigate the perceptions of general educators, special educators, and school counselors on the topic of overrepresentation of minorities (specifically, African American) in special education programs. The study took place in a rural school district in south central Alabama, where overrepresentation of African American…