This study examines how the beliefs that adolescent readers hold about knowledge and knowing are activated during online reading. The research questions center on the pattern of these readers' epistemic processes through which more or less productive learning occurs. High school students performed a critical online reading task on a controversial…

Over the last year and a half, a number of scholars, pundits, and journalists have criticized college campuses for coddling students by constructing environments that protect them from offensive opinions and evidence that disconfirms their prior attitudes. In this article, I suggest two pedagogical techniques that can help students encounter and…

Rapid social development and recent changes in views concerning childhood have urged a more holistic approach to measuring children's well-being, particularly in the domain of rights. In light of articulated provisions within the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, there is obvious interest in understanding more about how…

This study explores whether and how higher education students with various epistemic beliefs engage in argumentative discourse and shift their attitude within a digital dialogue game. Students were assigned to groups of four or five and asked to argue and explore various perspectives of four controversial issues of environmental education in four…

Higher levels of civic and community engagement in higher education are positively associated with students' academic performance and they also build upon citizenship skills such as informed voting. Yet, while these are worthy and important outcomes of higher education, students from disadvantaged backgrounds can have more difficulty navigating…

This observational, cross-sectional study examined students' retrospective recall of emotional distress when studying sensitive topics in psychology, and whether hardiness had a mediated pathway to emotional distress through a mental health condition (MHC). Psychology undergraduates (155 women, 34 men) from South Australian universities completed…

Minors are daily confronted with advertisements, which are occasionally controversial. In order to promote adolescents' moral advertising literacy, this intervention study explores how to stimulate secondary education students' knowledge on advertising law and their moral judgement of advertisements. Because a lot of new--especially…

Purpose: Literature indicates that open classroom climate (OCC) is a positive influence on civic outcomes. Few studies have explored factors that appear to facilitate OCC. Most research on OCC has focused on Western countries. The emphasis has been on individual student characteristics related to OCC with little attention made to school level…

We investigated the characteristics of early childhood education (ECE) preservice teachers (PSTs) who were identified as closed minded and their capacity to deal with controversial issues. We define open-mindedness as the willingness to consider experiences, beliefs, values, and perspectives that differ from one's own. First, we used quantitative…

In post-conflict and fragile contexts, one central aim of education is to prepare citizens to rebuild society and manage conflict. In this paper, we discuss the ways that citizenship education, students' civic attitudes, and student civic practices vary across two post-conflict contexts in Africa: Liberia and Rwanda. First, we consider the…

We explored medical student's views and perceptions of a series of debates conducted during problem-based learning (PBL) practiced as a part of the Spiral curriculum at the Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Saudi Arabia. A series of debates were employed during PBL sessions for second-year female medical students, over the period 2014-2016.…

Certain scientific conclusions are controversial, in that they are rejected by a substantial proportion of nonscientists despite an overwhelming scientific consensus. Science educators are motivated to help students understand the evidence behind the scientific consensus on these matters and to move students' views into alignment with those held…