Based on her study of the assessment and validation of final year projects in two academic departments--one located in a humanities faculty and the other in an engineering faculty of a South African university--Suellen Shay argues that the assessment of complex tasks is a socially situated interpretive act. Her argument centers on three questions.…

Job loss researchers have focused on the physical and mental well being of White working and middle class men, their families, friends, and coworkers to with immediate reemployment as the outcome. This study focused on low-income rural women dislocated workers and their decision to enroll in community college for retraining or seek immediate…

This article reports the findings of a survey of 558 teachers in England. It describes how conceptual and empirical insights from the literature informed the construction of questionnaire items to provide answers to questions about the way in which teachers value different classroom assessment practices and how congruent with these values they…

The nature of interaction in higher education environments impacts not only end outcomes, but also the approach to learning itself. Using a quasi-experimental research design, this empirical study tests the impact of social and academic interaction on student approaches to learning. Findings demonstrate significant correlations between contextual…

Contemporary theories of learning postulate one or at most a small number of different learning mechanisms. However, people are capable of mastering a given task through qualitatively different learning paths such as learning by instruction and learning by doing. We hypothesize that the knowledge acquired through such alternative paths differs…

A six-month longitudinal study (N = 33) proved the influence of a diversified sport enrichment program on the development of creative thinking in team ball sports among gifted children. A contrast between a gifted control group and a non-gifted treatment group showed that the creative performance of the gifted children significantly improved…

Online and computer-based instructional gaming is becoming a viable instructional strategy at all levels of education. The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of (a) gaming, (b) gaming plus embedded questions, and (c) gaming plus questions plus feedback on delayed retention of different types of educational objectives for students…

Three key contributions of Iris Young to democratic political theory, and three challenges that have arisen in response to Young's theory, are examined here in relation to education. First, Young has argued that oppression and domination, not distributive inequality, ought to guide discussions about justice. Second, eliminating oppression requires…

Seventy-two (n = 72) school counselors from South Carolina were surveyed to assess their perceptions of their pre-service training in relation to eight school-family-community partnership roles and their perceived level of involvement in these roles. This exploratory study sought to determine whether school counselors varied by school level in…

Relations among patterns of conceptual and procedural knowledge and grade were examined in 90 six- to eight-year-olds in order to explore addition and subtraction development. Conceptual knowledge was assessed by examining children's responses to pairs of problems reflecting various part-whole relations. Children solved related problems as part of…

It has been suggested that the ability to learn a foreign language is related to working memory. However, there is no clear evidence about which component of working memory may be involved. Two experiments investigated working memory problems in groups of seventh and eighth grade Italian children with difficulties in learning English as a second…

This paper reports the findings of a 20-week social adjustment enhancement curriculum for boys aged 8-12. The curriculum was designed to address three areas hypothesized to be deficient in persons with HFA, AS, and PDDNOS: emotion recognition and understanding; theory of mind; and executive functions/real life type problem solving. Parents…

Graduate students differ in their conceptualizations of mentoring. This study examined the relationship between students' demographic and academic characteristics (age, gender, citizenship, academic discipline, and stage of persistence) and their preferences for three styles of mentoring assessed by the Ideal Mentor Scale (IMS): Integrity,…

Background: Previous research has highlighted the importance of the transition to school for young children and their families. A child's successful adaptation to school is likely influenced by a number of factors, including academic, social, emotional, behavioural and cognitive competencies. Children with intellectual disability (ID) may be at…

Individual differences in measures of prereading skills and in questionnaire measures of 4-5-year-old twins' print environments in Australia, Scandinavia, and the United States were explored with a behavioral-genetic design. Modest phenotypic correlations were found between environmental measures and the twins' print knowledge, general verbal…