This study investigated how social group status and group bias are related to adolescents' reasoning about social acceptance. Ninth and eleventh-grade students (N = 379) were asked to make judgments about the inclusion of individuals in school activities based on their peer crowd membership. The results of the study revealed that both…

Purpose: Current research in both cognitive neuroscience and what has been called "positive psychology" point to the need for wholesale reappraisal of what happens in schools, especially with regard to the wellbeing of children. Seeks to examine this issue. Design/methodology/approach: Reviews and discussion of research by the World…

British Commonwealth universities inherited the class system for classifying degrees. However, increasing global marketization has brought with it increasing demands for student exchanges, particularly with universities in North America. Hence, Commonwealth universities are considering adopting grade point averages (GPAs) for degree classification…

Many universities and colleges list the development of lifelong learning skills as a curriculum objective and have adopted laptop programs that may enable lifelong learning. The purpose of this research is to address the effectiveness of a technology-based and computer-mediated learning environment in achieving lifelong learning skills from the…

This study describes the use and assesses the benefits of a virtual learning environment (VLE)-enhanced independent language learning program (ILLP), based on the "WebCT" platform, for three groups of first- and second-year Italian students. It considers the positive outcomes of the program for the students' learning abilities. These outcomes…

Learning performance assessment aims to evaluate what knowledge learners have acquired from teaching activities. Objective technical measures of learning performance are difficult to develop, but are extremely important for both teachers and learners. Learning performance assessment using learning portfolios or web server log data is becoming an…

Starting from the first public draft of IMS Learning Design in November 2002, a research project at the Catholic University Eichstaett-Ingolstadt in Germany was dedicated to the conceptual examination and empirical review of IMS Learning Design Level A. A prototypical runtime environment called "lab005" was developed. It was built based…

The present research examined whether high school students ethically justify bullying behaviour within a school context. Ten students, purposefully selected because of their specific roles within the bully/victim paradigm, participated in semi-structured interviews. Data analysis using the constant comparative method associated with grounded…

Written communication scholarship has shown that successful social change requires discursive stability. This study was designed to investigate how this stability is created. Critical discourse analysis of 30 corporate university articles investigated claims authors made about the expansion of market-based values into contexts of organizational…

The present study explores the development patterns of three modern foreign language student teachers' conceptions of self (conceptions of their classroom performance, conceptions of their relationship with pupils, conceptions of their self-image in pupils' eyes and conceptions of teacher identity) during a nine-month programme leading to a…

At the beginning of 2006 the media reported instances where people who had been convicted of sexual offences against children were permitted to work in schools. A list of unsuitable people (known as "List 99") has existed for over 80 years and yet the system appears to have broken down. In this article I seek to examine some of the…

This paper examines the ways in which gender, religion, ethnicity and class intertwine in a state religious girl's junior high school in Israel. It is based on ethnographic data collected from 1999-2002, including interviews with staff and students and observations of classes and other school events. The claim is made that in this school,…

How might a concern with children's spirituality "touch down" within the different spaces, discourses and performances within a school? This article is concerned with the affordances of children's rights discourse in relation to young people's participation, deliberation, and ethical work upon the self, within one primary school in…

In responding to globalisation, Irish curricula advocate active learning and cooperative groupwork methods in second-level schools but there are many difficulties in implementing them. This paper explores the experiences and perspectives of teachers, students, principals and university teacher educators and is based on a recent qualitative study.…

Educational process reflection (EPR) is a professional development model aimed at supporting preschool teachers reflecting on and changing their practice. A particular focus is on interaction between practitioners and children, and between the children themselves. In this article, I first describe the theoretical frameworks that helped shape EPR,…