At the level of society and educational planners, there is a widespread expectation that teachers must use creative teaching approaches to fulfill the requirements of the twenty-first century. The mere teacher-centered method mainly focuses on memorization and may not be feasible. Teachers must be aware of innovative methods of teaching. One such…

Academic literacy as an embodiment of higher-order language and thinking skills within the academic community bears huge significance for language socialization, resource distribution and even power disposition within the larger sociocultural context. However, although the notion of academic literacy has been initiated for more than twenty years,…

While the terms student-centred and learner-centred are used to describe a range of neo-liberal educational policies and practices around the world, the meaning is not clearly defined. This limits its utility as a concept in policy, research and practice. This article applies abductive reasoning to explore how student-centred education is…

Shared reading represents an established practice to foster preschool vocabulary development, particularly when coupled with explicit instruction in word meanings. However, a question remains as to whether explicit word definitions detract from story delivery and hence language learning. Accordingly, this study compared explicit versus…

Multicultural Education as a field of study in education is intimately connected to Teacher Education. Most frameworks in Multicultural Education are primarily centered on the inclusion of cultural and linguistic diversity in schools. This often results in the integration of heroes and holidays within the curriculum, however this orientation can…

The purpose of this study was to systematically review the literature to identify school-related outcomes associated with trauma in school-aged youth. The sample of articles (n = 83) included data on school-aged youth (pre-kindergarten to grade 12) who were 18 years or younger. Cognitive, academic, and teacher reported social-emotional-behavioral…

Moral foundations theory chastises cognitive developmental theory for having foisted on moral psychology a restrictive conception of the moral domain which involves arbitrarily elevating the values of justice and caring. The account of this negative influence on moral psychology, referred to in the moral foundations theory literature as the…

Geometrical notions and properties occur in real-world problems, thus Geometry has an important place in school Mathematics curricula. Primary school curricula lays the foundation of Geometry knowledge, pupils learn Geometry notions and properties by exploring their environment. Thus it is very important that primary school teachers have a good…

Although curiosity is an undeniably important aspect of children's cognitive development, a universally accepted operational definition of children's curiosity does not exist. Almost all of the research on measuring curiosity has focused on adults, and has used predominately questionnaire-type measures that are not appropriate for young children.…

This article reports the findings from a study of undergraduate students in an academic program focused on integrative learning rather than interdisciplinarity. One aspect of this study included how students defined integrative learning. This participant-shaped understanding of integrative learning was broad and reflected a continuum of…

The author's doctoral work involved relating abilities in play to the results of a developmental assessment. She found them to be highly correlated, which should have made her happy. Instead she was troubled by the results. The skills that children use in play are important. Given materials that appeal to them and that "pull for" the desired skill…

Research on Piaget's four stages of cognitive development has shown that although nearly everyone passes through sensorimotor, preoperational, and concrete operational stages, most do not reach the stage of formal operations. Those people who do attain formal operations seem to have a curiosity factor not operative in those who don't. (Author/BRR)

We propose an integration of aspects of several developmental and systems of beliefs models of personal epistemology. Qualitatively different positions, including realism, dogmatism, skepticism, and rationalism, are characterized according to individuals' beliefs across three dimensions in a model of epistemic and ontological cognition. This model…

Asserting that play encourages development of the cognitive map, this article describes the development of a cognitive map and explores the function of play in that development. (JC)

The article discusses aspects of the definition of "learning disabilities". The process of learning is discussed including such themes as social interaction, personal reflection and response, integration, transformation/growth, and ecological wholeness, balance, and fit. Encouraged is a nonproblematic definition of learning disabilities. (DB)