Starting in summer 2011, two librarians at Wesleyan University annually interviewed and directed usability studies with undergraduate students to determine how students interact with academic e-books. In 2014, the librarians used a campuswide quantitative survey to supplement these longitudinal qualitative findings. While students are increasingly…

Mobile phone service is increasing among low income populations; however, with over 1 billion mobile service users worldwide, many people still lack banking services. Banks do not reach out to the poor because of the high operational costs involved. Scholars and industry practitioners have indicated that mobile phones could be an alternative…

The challenging of assessing formal and informal online learning at scale includes various issues. Many universities who are now promoting "Massive Online Open Courses" (MOOC), for instance, focus on relatively informal assessment of participant competence, which is not highly "quality assured". This paper reports best…

This paper draws upon the sociology of numbers, particularly work by Theodore Porter, to reveal the multifarious ways in which numbers actively constitute practices in schools. Drawing upon a case study of one low-performing school in a low-performing region in the state of Queensland, Australia, and theorising into the sociology of numbers, the…

Problem Statement: Turkey's passive and task-oriented approach to citizenship education, which has endured since the Ottoman Empire period, has begun to change into more active and democratic citizenship education since Turkey joined the European Union. Identifying the practical problems as well as describing the challenges when practicing the…

This article explores the paradoxical situation of early career teachers in this era of standards-based reforms, beginning with the experiences of an English teacher working in a state school in Queensland, Australia and expanding to consider the viewpoints of her colleagues. Our goal is to trace the ways she and the other early career teachers at…

Training of pre- and in-service teachers constitutes one of the most important aspects in the quality assurance of language testing and assessment (LTA). For instance, foreign language (FL) teachers have to deal with standardised tests as well as their own classroom-based assessment procedures. This means they need the necessary expertise that can…

Media literacy, the abilities "to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate information in a variety of forms" (NAMLE), is necessary to help people understand the information presented to them and make informed decisions. However, despite decades of work to include media literacy education in academic learning (Hobbs and Jensen 2009),…

Test accommodations are changes to test administration, responses, or the test itself that are offered to emergent bilingual students for standardized tests and also for classroom assessments in some states in the USA. Currently there is a lack of research examining the use of test accommodations as a pedagogical practice. This paper presents a…

Families and schools need to gain a mutual understanding in order to provide a favourable learning environment for the school child, especially in a culturally diverse society. This paper explores the interrelationships between the family and school practices of two Hong Kong-Australian families from the parents' perspectives. The data presented…

This study examined some of the factors that influence students' transition from Ontario high school chemistry to university introductory chemistry. The study was a mixed-methods, multi-phase research study carried out by an undergraduate honours thesis student who had experienced some of these transition issues. Students' transition into…

In a national context of standards and high-stakes testing, concerns are emerging about challenges to the already tenuous position of the citizenship mission in the social studies curriculum. In this qualitative study, the authors administered a survey to social studies teachers in Ohio and conducted follow-up interviews focusing on the present…

The potential use of computer-based assessments has raised concerns from educators, policymakers, and parents about information technology infrastructure in school districts and the preparation of staff and students to use new technologies for assessment purposes, and the potential impact of testing activities on core school functions,…

This article about the discourse of pedagogy as related to child cognition in mathematics addresses the issue of what constitutes the main disciplinary content and the pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) of foundation-phase teachers. I argue that, unless child cognition itself is the primary disciplinary content of foundation-phase teacher's…

An examination is an important component of any institution that educates people. It is a form of assessment used to measure the students' understanding of the concepts and principles they would have learnt. Zimbabwe Open University, an Open and Distance Learning institution has been setting its own examinations for the academic programmes…