Leadership is a highly complex activity, as leaders respond to increasing diversity and external accountability. Additionally, there is increased recognition that leadership is deeply contextual, sensitive to macro-politics of systems and micro-politics of individual schools. In Ontario, Canada, the school improvement effort is focused on raising…

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the role of two personality traits (i.e. Agreeableness and Conscientiousness from the Big Five personality traits) in predicting rating error in the self-assessment and peer-assessment of composition writing. The average self/peer-rating errors of 136 Iranian English major undergraduates…

Little empirical data are available concerning the cognitive abilities of gifted individuals in general and especially those who excel in mathematics. We examined visual processing abilities distinguishing between general giftedness (G) and excellence in mathematics (EM). The research population consisted of 190 students from four groups of 10th-…

This study investigated how population parameters representing heterogeneity of variance, skewness, kurtosis, bimodality, and outlier-proneness, drawn from normal and eleven non-normal distributions, also characterized the ranks corresponding to independent samples of scores. When the parameters of population distributions from which samples were…

This paper investigates the use of discourse markers among Form Four second language learner (SLL) students in essay writing. The objectives of this study are to discover how Form Four SLL students use discourse markers in their essay writing and to identify the teachers' perception about the usage of discourse markers among students. 30…

Mathematics educators have had a long standing interest in students' understanding of decimal numbers. Most studies of students' understanding of decimals have been conducted within Western cultural settings. Similar research in other countries is important for a number of reasons, perhaps most importantly because it can provide insights that may…

We examined language-switching effects in French-English bilinguals using a paradigm where pictures are always named in the same language (either French or English) within a block of trials, and on each trial, the picture is preceded by a printed word from the same language or from the other language. Participants had to either make a language…

A goal of this study was to examine elementary preservice teachers' (PSTs) ability to contextualize and decontextualize fraction subtraction by asking them to write word problems to represent fraction subtraction expressions and to choose prewritten word problems to support given fraction subtraction expressions. Three themes emerged from the…

The usability of computer interfaces may have a major influence on learning. Design approaches that optimize usability are commonplace in the software development industry but are seldom used in the development of e-learning resources, especially in medical education. We conducted a usability evaluation of a multimedia resource for teaching…

Children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) often struggle with spelling, which can have a negative effect on their written expression. Recent research has shown that linguistic analyses of spelling errors can be used to identify areas of need and guide remediation for spelling success. However, this research has not been conducted with…

This paper reports on one aspect of a wider study that investigated a selection of final year pre-service primary teachers' responses to four probability tasks. The tasks focused on foundational ideas of probability including sample space, independence, variation and expectation. Responses suggested that strongly held intuitions appeared to…

This article describes an initial study of the effect of focused attention on phonological speech errors. In 3 experiments, participants recited 4-word tongue twisters and focused attention on 1 (or none) of the words. The attended word was singled out differently in each experiment; participants were under instructions to avoid errors on the…

In abstraction, or conceptual behavior, people discriminate features or properties of their surroundings. This permits people to respond selectively and precisely to specialized features of their environment, which has had many benefits, including steady advances in science and technology. Within psychology, J. R. Kantor and B. F. Skinner…

Purpose: To examine the nature and extent of semantic deficits in bilingual children with language impairment (LI). Method: Thirty-seven Spanish-English bilingual children with LI (ranging from age 7;0 [years;months] to 9;10) and 37 typically developing (TD) age-matched peers generated 3 associations to 12 pairs of translation equivalents in…

Purpose: Early apraxia of speech (AOS) research has characterized errors as being variable, resulting in a number of different error types being produced on repeated productions of the same stimuli. Conversely, recent research has uncovered greater consistency in errors, but there are limited data examining sound errors over time (more than one…