This book focuses on discourses of effective learning environments globally for reducing discrimination in schools. It offers innovative ideas concerning the future directions that education and policy reforms could take, in order to promote equality, social justice, and access to quality of education for all. The chapters offer a timely analysis…

For more than two decades, the concept of student engagement has grown from simple attention in class to a construct comprised of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral components that embody and further develop motivation for learning. Similarly, the goals of student engagement have evolved from dropout prevention to improved outcomes for lifelong…

Examines the degree to which experiencing confusion during the acquisition of new academic material differentially affects classroom performance of helpless and mastery-oriented fifth-graders. Provides an initial test of a theoretical approach to understanding differences between male and female performances in different subject areas. (AS)

Describes a study of the role of face-to-face teaching and learning in two distance education courses at Athabasca University. Concerned with effects of a seminar on adult learner success, the study addressed the questions of whether students will attend optional seminars, how distance learners perceive seminars, whether attendees perform better,…

A study investigated tenacity of adult students who have once again made their way back to academia. The specific purpose was to discover how these students understood their own history of college enrollment and their perceptions of themselves as persisters. Participants were 63 "tenacious persisters" in three sections of an orientation class at a…

Describes a study of secondary school students in Nigeria to determine whether use of musical accompaniment on videotape recordings used in instruction of economic geography had any effects on students' learning. Results offer inconclusive differences in effect between video instruction accompanied by music and video instruction without music.…

The Learning Strategies Questionnaire (LSQ) was developed to assess students' declarative knowledge of strategy utility. Goals were to develop a reliable survey that: (1) could be administered for fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders in a group setting; (2) would provide a profile of children's declarative knowledge of strategies for classroom…

This paper explores the question of how and what a school can do to foster student discipline and effort. Personal experiences and observations are offered about the approaches and strategies used in schools and by parents in Taiwan, China to foster students' positive attitudes toward learning and school. This document focuses on the approaches…

While effective schools research has inspired new efforts toward improving education for all students, it is flawed by offering simplistic prescriptions based on correlational studies focusing on basic skills achievement. Effective school research and theory can be upgraded by a more careful definition of the goals of learning and a systematic…

Japanese children's performance in school is a product of a social consensus favoring attention to children's learning, a set of cultural values focusing on the commitment of effort, and a psychological milieu in the family which encourages achievement in a safe and nurturant atmosphere. This paper treats especially this latter environment, that…

This 1-week study explored the extent to which high school students (n=140) acquired meaningful understanding of selected biological topics (meiosis and the Punnett square method) and the relationship between these topics. This study: (1) examined "mental modeling" as a technique for measuring students' meaningful understanding of the…

This study investigated the retention of meaningful understanding of the biological topics of meiosis, the Punnett square method and the relations between these two topics. This study also explored the predictive influence of students' general tendency to learn meaningfully or by rote (meaningful learning orientation), prior knowledge of meiosis,…

This study explored how motivational and achievement factors interact and affect persistence in minority undergraduate engineering students. Study participants were 38 entering Mexican and African American college students in an engineering program at a large, southwestern university in the Fall of 1990. Each student was assigned to a peer…