People participate in vocational education and training (VET) for a variety of reasons and at different stages of their life. Some undertake VET to gain the vocational skills necessary to enter the labour market for the first time, while others enter in order to upgrade existing skills, learn new ones, or simply for personal interest. Successful…

In this article we present the findings of a research study which investigated the opportunities for creative reasoning (CR) made available to first year undergraduate students in assessments. We compared three first year calculus courses across two Irish universities using Lithner's framework. This framework sets apart imitative reasoning (IR)…

Turkey is ranked at the 54th out of 72 countries in terms of science achievement in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey conducted in 2015, which is a very big disappointment for that country. The aim of this research was to determine factors affecting Turkish students' science achievements in order to identify the…

Parents evaluate the reputations of the schools when making judgements about their desirability. They try to approximate the quality of schools and the social environment and contrast those with their hopes and fears concerning their child's education. We aim to clarify how the reputations of schools are constructed in Finland and Chile and what…

International trends for pre-registration nurse education at degree level alongside "widening access" initiatives mean that academic achievement of students entering via different educational routes is of interest to both higher and further education institutions. This article examines the academic achievement of students undertaking a…

Ontology is a knowledge representation technique which aims to make knowledge explicit by defining the core concepts and their relationships. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is a statistical technique which aims to explore the core factors from empirical data and estimates the relationship between these factors. This article presents an…

Background: Many university departments use students' evaluations of teaching (SET) to compare and rank courses. However, absenteeism from class is often nonrandom and, therefore, SET for different courses might not be comparable. Objective: The present study aims to answer two questions. Are SET positively biased due to absenteeism? Do…

Using data from a nationally representative survey of over a 1000 young people in the UK this paper proposes a typology of the ways young people are using the Internet outside formal educational settings; and examines the individual and contextual factors that help to explain why young people are using the Internet in this way. Specifically, this…

The Fraser Institute "Report Card" of school rankings has won the hearts of parents and the press. For over a decade, the rankings have been particularly burdensome for low-ranking (usually low socio-economic status, high-poverty) schools when parents of high-achieving children move them to higher-ranking schools. In February 2010, after…

This paper employs a stochastic production frontier model to assess the efficiency of the senior secondary schools in the Gambia. It examines their efficiency in using and mixing the educational inputs of average teacher salary, average teacher education, average teacher experience and students-to-teacher ratio in producing the number of students…

The purpose of this cross-sectional study was to determine what participation issues are important to adolescents with cerebral palsy (CP). Two hundred and three adolescents with CP (mean age 16.0 [plus or minus] 1.8 years) were assessed using the Canadian Occupational Performance Measure (COPM). This was done through semistructured interviews by…

The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a better understanding of boundary issues in global virtual teams, especially in higher education settings. Although previous research in the past decade has studied various aspects of global virtual teams, there is no comprehensive review of boundary issues and their impact. This dissertation…

The current main world university rankings broadly group the leading research universities of nations. Australia's Go8 universities are generally within the top 250 ranked universities, with several institutions in the top 50-100 on some measures. This recognition is commendable, however imperfect the individual rankings may be. Use is made of…

Investigated hand preference using a questionnaire. Respondents were divided into: right-handers (N=523), left-handers (N=412), and impossible to classify (N=42). Items were subjected to a cluster analysis. Results show a clear grouping of items for left-handers and a vaguely similar grouping for right-handers, characterized by the muscle groups…

Investigated whether Brazilian 4-year-olds held essentialist beliefs about animal categories. Found that middle class and poor children were equally likely to interpret labels as referring to mutually exclusive animal categories, and more likely to accept a common label for animals sharing internal properties than superficial properties,…