This article presents the results of an investigation into the place of English in the curriculum in several countries in the Asia-Pacific region. The study indicates that the emergence of English as a global language is having considerable impact on policies and practices in all countries surveyed. However, it also reveals significant problems,…

Promoting local development in order to support school improvement is an important aspect of contemporary educational policy in Sweden. Recent state initiatives have sought to combine curriculum and teacher development. A common form of cooperation is facilitation, where academics support groups of teachers in their school projects. This article…

This paper reports on a small-scale case study of five newly qualified teachers in one school. The aim of the study was to identify the context and learning factors that enable and constrain the professional growth of new teachers, and to locate the place of formal induction arrangements within the broader experiences of the first year in…

The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between such factors as learning style, gender, prior experience, and successful achievement in contrasting modules taken by a cohort of thirty design and technology trainee teachers during their degree programme at a University in the North East of England. Achievement data were collected…

Aggression Replacement Training (ART) has been introduced and adopted with youth and families at Batshaw Youth and Family Centres in Montreal, Canada. The Batshaw philosophy of "Family Centered Practice" has generated a program which includes parents and significant others in what we call "Family ART" groups. Within the Batshaw…

Mainstream educators tend to assume that families should follow a school-prescribed pathway, centred on parent-child storyreading sessions, to help their children become literate and achieve educational success. The research discussed here focuses on case studies of bilingual families with six-year-old children growing up in London, and shows that…

With a view to developing support for university accreditation, this small-scale study assisted 18 special educational needs coordinators (SENCos) to identify significant learning at work and consider possibilities for accredited learning projects. Participants wrote and shared narratives of critical learning incidents, assessed the contribution…

We use quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the links between participation in adult learning and self-efficacy, particularly for the subgroup of adults who had low levels of achievement at school. We focus on self-efficacy because it translates into a range of wider benefits and because it may afford protection from depression and…

This article describes how workshop sessions have attempted to help teachers from one curriculum area develop their diagnostic skills to use in assessment for learning. The approach uses the metaphor of the teacher-as-learning-doctor to encourage teachers to think about the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of learning "bugs". The…

In South Africa where there is a very high HIV infection rate among teenagers and young adults, it is surprising to find that students and teachers are very unwilling to talk about the possibility of being or becoming HIV positive. While AIDS messages dominate public discourse, there is a silence in schools about the personal in relation to AIDS.…

This study examined the priority health behaviors among Chinese youth by administering a questionnaire to 1,917 undergraduates enrolled in three universities in China. The response rate was 89.7%. This survey found that 75.2% of the participants tried cigarettes at least once during their lifetime, over half had their first cigarette and alcoholic…

This paper draws on experiences with teaching on online course in digital library issues. The course is offered as part of an MLIS programme. The paper explores student reactions to the online learning environment, which has been delivered using the commercial products WebCT and Blackboard. Student reactions to the use of synchronous and…

This paper investigates the perceptions of the heads of 12 Library and Information Science (LIS) schools on Knowledge Management (KM) education. These heads from North America, Europe and the Pacific region had either been offering KM courses or had an apparent interest in such programs. Data about perceptions were gathered on the nature of their…

This paper discusses one aspect of the findings from an ethnographic study of the ways in which four-year-old children learn, and are taught, at home and in their Reception class. The children were from two distinctive cultural backgrounds within the same urban neighbourhood: one-half belonged to UK ("Anglo") families, and one-half to…

Since past studies showing that competition has negative effects on group process were primarily conducted in traditional classrooms involving face-to-face situations, this study extends past research by investigating whether the negative effects associated with face-to-face team competition can be mitigated with the support of networking…