Primary geography education is an important part of initial teacher education. The importance of prior experiences in the development of student teachers has long been recognised and there is growing evidence of the nature of those experiences in areas such as geography. This paper reports the findings of research conducted with one cohort of…

This study compares the language learner and test-taking strategies used by Chinese-speaking graduate students when confronted with familiar versus unfamiliar topics in an English multiple-choice format reading comprehension test. Thirty-six participants at a large mid-western university performed three tasks: A content knowledge vocabulary…

Reading comprehension--the ability to understand the meaning of text--is a foundational ability that enables children to learn in school and throughout life. Children who struggle with reading comprehension in the third or fourth grade are at high risk for dropping out of school, with detrimental effects on their future employment, income, and…

This paper reports on an innovative and action research project which focused on the use of the dictionary and the prior knowledge of Colombian high school students to improve their reading comprehension of short scientific texts. Data collection instruments included students' work gathered during two workshops, field notes, and a questionnaire.…

Our study contributes to our understanding of Internet reading by Emergent Bilinguals (EB) and Native English speakers (NS) by investigating their recall of two Internet reading passages containing additional information available through either hypertext links or footnotes. Participants included 25 EB and 25 NS college students. Answers to cued…

Engagement has evolved from concerns of "access," "diversity," and "public service" between the academy and communities. Land-grant institutions (LGI), considered the "public's universities," have represented a unique population in American higher education with their historic 150-year tradition of teaching, research, and service. Carnegie…

This study attempted to answer the question, "To what extent do 12th-grade high-ability students feel that their past educational experiences, particularly in high school, have challenged their academic abilities?" Much research has been conducted in the field of gifted education about the identification, social and emotional…

This action research explored attitudes and perceptions of students at a Midwestern university enrolled in at least one fully online course during fall 2012. Our objective was to initiate a study that gathered comprehensive information about the diversity of the online phenomenon at our university so that we could seek improvement as online…

The focus of this study is to explore EFL teachers' perceptions, evaluations and expectations about English language courses as EFL in Saudi tertiary level. In other words, this article aims at creating a new avenue for effective EFL teaching-learning curriculum techniques and syllabus in the Saudi tertiary context. Saudi universities offer credit…

Independently learning from informative texts becomes increasingly important from the age of 11. Little information is available, however, on (a) how and to what extent late elementary education students already apply specific text-learning strategies, and (b) whether different learner profiles can already be distinguished. In this study, a…

A total of 136 eighth-grade math students from 2 Singapore schools learned from either productive failure (PF) or vicarious failure (VF). PF students "generated" solutions to a complex problem targeting the concept of variance that they had not learned yet before receiving instruction on the targeted concept. VF students…

The purpose of this study is to apply the technology acceptance model to examine the employees' attitudes and acceptance of electronic learning (e-learning) systems in organisations. This study examines four factors (organisational support, computer self-efficacy, prior experience and task equivocality) that are believed to influence employees'…

In this study, we compared the effects of simulator-based virtual ultrasound scanning practice to classroom-based hands-on ultrasound scanning practice on participants' knowledge of FAST window quadrants and interpretation, and on participants' performance on live patient FAST exams. Twenty-five novice participants were randomly assigned to the…

How information literate are the Google generation, and what information literacy skills do they bring to university? For university libraries, understanding student prior knowledge provides a foundation on which to introduce appropriate learning activities during the first year. In 2009, in response to a new pedagogical model in health sciences,…

This study investigated the effects of analogy on the elimination of students' misconceptions about direct current circuits, students' achievement and the attitudes towards physics lessons. The sample of this study consisted of 51 11th grade students from two different classes. While one of the classes was the experimental group where analogy was…