International large-scale student assessments (ILSAs) in education represent a valuable source of information for policy-makers, not only on student achievements, but also on their relationship with different contextual factors. The results are partly described in the official studies' reports; more can be derived from the publicly released data…

Drawing on data from a larger doctoral study, this paper specifically explores influences on the discourses of professionalism amongst a sample of highly engaged teachers within the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO). The study is rooted in the assumption that discourse takes shape within a highly politicized system of socialization…

Students' feedback on teaching activities significantly contributes to the enhancement of the quality of teaching and learning. Conventionally students evaluate teaching activities through paper based systems, where they fill out and return paper copies of teaching or course evaluation. In the last decades, institutions are moving student…

Whether instructional-communication feedback sent to struggling students and succeeding students following course exams would significantly increase their exam scores and significantly decrease their exam-skipping behavior relative to students in the control group was investigated. An experimenter-blind study utilizing feedback and the…

Charter public schools began as the "research and development" alternative to traditional public schools over 20 years ago, but today they account for significant portions of student enrollment in many cities. In more than 190 districts across the country, charter school attendance makes up at least 10 percent of public school student…

This article investigates the process of development for a novel online peer-supported approach that enhances oral proficiency in French at an Australian university to cope with ever more complex challenges. These challenges include students with mixed ability in the same class, reduced teaching resources and student surveys identifying a lack of…

Introductory courses in mathematics and physical sciences are challenging for students and often have lower success rates than other comparable courses. In online courses, this is compounded by students employing surface learning strategies. Furthermore, it has been shown that students often do not utilize learning materials that are provided in…

In this article, I focus on three areas of reading assessment that I believe to be crucial for students' reading development: developing comprehensive formative assessments, assessing the wide array of factors that contribute to students' reading development, and fostering student independence by helping students learn to use reading assessment on…

This chapter describes the individual and institutional factors leading to greater civic outcomes among students at four The Democracy Commitment (TDC) colleges in California.

The relationship between cognitive processing and spatial ability offers insight into the effectiveness of complex images for learning. In this study we demonstrate that high and low spatial ability learners process complex images differently for learning. Processing for the present study was determined by changes in cerebral blood velocity and…

Interim testing of studied information, compared with restudying or no treatment, facilitates subsequent learning and retention of new information--"the forward testing effect." Previous research exploring this effect has shown that interim testing of studied information from a given domain enhances subsequent learning and retention of…

This study investigated the foreign language anxiety (FLA) construct of U.S. college learners of Chinese as a foreign language (N = 149) and examined whether the following factors, "gender," "language class level," and "whether foreign language(s) were learned prior to learning Chinese," had significant influences on…

Accurate self-evaluation is critical for learning. Calibration describes the relationship between learners' perception of their performance and their actual performance on a task. Here, we describe two studies aimed at assessing and improving student calibration in a first-semester introductory biology course at a 4-year public institution. Study…

Purpose: Different studies have analyzed the relationship between organizational learning (OL) and innovation performance (IP). However, the question of how innovation culture (IC) affects the relationship between OL and IP remains unexplored. This study aims to examine the impact of IC on the relationship between OL and various dimensions of IP,…

There are many important pedagogical factors that need to be implemented in classrooms including language classrooms in order to build an incentive learning environment for the students. This paper sheds light on two of these main pedagogical factors which are feedback and praise. The main purpose of this paper is to alter negative perceptions…