This study presents a three-year replication and extension of Maurer's (2013) evaluation of a classroom activity to reduce prejudice and discrimination. Students in six sections of an introductory family science course were assigned to one of three conditions and one of two target marginalized groups for a 3x2 design. Results differed…

In the early 2000s, China's Ministry of Education embarked on a program of school mapping restructure (SMR) that involved closing small rural schools and opening up larger centralized schools in towns and county seats.The stated aim of the policy was to improve educational resources and raise the human capital of rural students. Any progress that…

This is an article about secondary schools in England, and what type of school is fair and efficient for a national education system. It discusses what "fair" could mean in this context, summarises some key policy revisions since 1944 in this light, and reminds readers of the damage caused by unfairness within education. Most notably it…

In this paper, I describe an innovative assignment for teaching undergraduate students cross-cultural understanding. The Outsider/Insider assignment simultaneously teaches facts about cultural difference and skills for managing cross-cultural encounters. Briefly, the assignment is to write two short papers, one in which the student describes a…

This article examined how the group membership of the person being judged influenced the level of moral reasoning. Nearly 200 ordinary Italians were given two measures of moral ingroup inclusiveness (the Bogardus social distance scale and a self-categorization measure) and the short form of Rest's Defining Issues Test (DIT). The protagonists in…

The purpose of this article was to identify how differing cultural factors affect informal learning in the workplace. We have introduced concepts and reviewed studies on informal learning and national culture based on an extensive literature review on the factors influencing informal learning, particularly based on five Hofstede's dimensions of…

The empirical research presented in the article is the realization of a recent project of Sapienza University of Rome, which involved 10 Roman schools (five academic and five technical high schools), including in each of them one section of the 5-year scholastic cycle, for a total sample of 920 students. The aim was to identify contextual,…

The main purpose of this study was to explore the perceived social distance among a small Arab community residing in a college town in the Midwest of the USA. The study examines its possible impact on the process of learning/acquiring English as a second language (ESL). It draws on the findings and contentions of the acculturation model as…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore how healthcare professionals in Denmark perceived and enacted their role as diabetes trainers for Arabic-speaking immigrants in three new local authority settings. The paper used positioning theory, which is a dynamic alternative to the more static concept of role in that it seeks to capture the…

Teacher beliefs are an important area of inquiry because research has found that these beliefs are often diverse (Breen et al., 2001) and strongly impact classroom practices (Borg, 1998, 2003; Burns, 1992; Farrell & Bennis, 2013). Therefore, uninformed teacher beliefs could be to the detriment of the L2 learner. Despite the fact that knowledge…

This article attempts an initial exploration of the ramifications of geopolitical partition for identity in the context of children and their education. While not an exhaustive definition, partitions may be observed to follow armed conflict between human collectivities (nation-states, putative nations, ethnic groups, etc.) and are the outcome of…

Literacy is considered to be a public good--one that benefits not only literate people, but also others in society through mechanisms of sharing and mediation. But to what extent do the benefits of literacy extend to socially distant groups? This paper applies the sociological concept of social distance to examine how social stratification impacts…

Although international students are an important source of income to universities in the UK, the emotional impact of their experiences may be ignored and unacknowledged. This study explored the personal experiences of international students studying for an undergraduate degree in the UK. Semi-structured interviews with five participants were…

Research shows that a very small percentage of those who suffer from mental illness seek professional help and fear of stigma is a principal factor why individuals are reluctant to obtain assistance. This study evaluated whether using examples of celebrities' experiences with mental illness as a form of "contact" with a mentally ill…

An instrument was developed to assess the perceived learner-teacher transactional distance in the context of the Hellenic Open University and to provide psychometric evidence of reliability and validity of the interpretation of the scores derived from the scale. First, an elicitation study gathered information on students' beliefs and feelings…