This submission represents the views of a newly formed organisation known as Public Libraries Australia. Formed to aggregate the political, service and infrastructure capacity of Australia's 1510 (ABS June 2000) public libraries, Public Libraries Australia will support and represent public libraries on a national basis. Networked across Australia…

The young people quoted in this paper attend two high schools in Umlazi Township, KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Poverty is rife in the area: some students are known to go five days at a stretch without food. Parts of the vast, sprawling township are notorious for shootings and violent crime. The rape of schoolgirls on their way to and from school…

This article reports on a 6-year study that examined the association between pre-admission variables and field placement performance in an Australian bachelor of social work program (N=463). Very few of the pre-admission variables were found to be significantly associated with performance. These findings and the role of the admissions process are…

This paper examines philosophical frame factors for English Language Teaching in the Confucian Heritage Culture (CHC) classroom. Drawing on the experience of a Native English Teacher in a government-aided Hong Kong High School it pays attention to two related difficulties: the "reality" of English in the classroom and the perceived…

What might add quality to life during the last period of the life cycle? In study I, five focus groups of elderly participants representing different ages and socioeconomic backgrounds provided descriptions of quality of life (QOL) from their own perspectives. These descriptions formed the basis of a questionnaire that was administered to a…

Maternal prenatal smoking, birth weight and sociodemographic factors were investigated in relation to cognitive abilities of 1544 children (aged 3.5 years) participating in the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Children's Development. The Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) was used to assess verbal ability, the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale…

Purpose: To examine HRM strategies and practices and HRM position within organizations in various cultural, economic and sociopolitical contexts from a longitudinal perspective. Design/methodology/approach: The study uses the 1995 and 1999 Cranet data in a longitudinal methodological framework to explore the changes and trends in 18 European…

In Western Australia there is a relatively small number of students whose behaviour is so severe that they are precluded from participating in regular schools. One alternative education placement for these students has been to enrol them in the Schools of Isolated and Distance Education (SIDE) program. This research reviews the enrolment of…

This paper discusses the relatively new phenomenon of university education faculties offering offshore education. The analogy, "flying in, flying out" captures the intensity of such offshore experiences for visiting academics, and contrasts their professional experiences against expatriate academics. This paper reports on case studies of…

School classes can be conceptualized as bounded communities of practice made up of teachers and students working together to build knowledge. Teachers make design decisions about physical and virtual spaces supported by information and communications technologies, and about curriculum. Design influences how students go about their work, and their…

The work the authors are going to describe in this paper is an account of the attempt to re-establish an educational relationship with adolescent drop-outs, for whom school often represented a cage from which they either escaped or were expelled. An experimental school scheme named the Chance Project has been operating in Naples for the past three…

This paper reports a previously unpublished comparative analysis of data from the ImpaCT2 study investigating the relationship between students' performance in England on national tests and their reported use of information technology (particularly networked technology) for school work, at three age levels (11, 14 and 16), in English, Maths and…

It has been proposed that situated cognition theory, in which learning is conceptualized as induction into a community of practice through the activity of legitimate peripheral participation, offers an appropriate theoretical perspective for examining issues of gender in science education. This study critically engages with this proposal by means…

This article considers the question of what specific actions a teacher might take to create a culture of inquiry in a secondary school mathematics classroom. Sociocultural theories of learning provide the framework for examining teaching and learning practices in a single classroom over a two-year period. The notion of the zone of proximal…

The 2002 restructuring of the national curriculum in all Japanese public elementary and secondary schools includes a reduction and reallocation of instructional hours, and the addition of a new "integrated studies" course, with an emphasis on more individualized, cross-curricular thematic projects. This reform comes at a time when a…