It is well documented that the first-year experience is crucial to student success at university. The transition to university provides many challenges for students from a personal, social and academic perspective. Over several decades, universities across Australia have implemented strategies to improve the attrition rate of first year students.…

Society's reliance on technology today has created a demand for more effective ways of communication unlike any before. The need to communicate has made its way from the home to the business world and into the educational setting. This article discusses the historical journey that has landed communication in the classroom. Scholars such as Piaget…

The year 2010 was named the Year of Social Media, a technology of communication and for creating and exchanging "User Generated Content". The year 2010 also marked the start of the Arab revolts where, in Tunisia and Egypt, social media served as a critical platform for expressing dissent, organizing, and providing citizen media accounts…

Background: The nature and characteristics of the peer social networks of young children with Down syndrome (DS) in classroom settings were examined within a developmental framework. Method: Comparisons were made with younger typically developing children matched on mental age and typically developing children matched on chronological age.…

This article describes an assignment that encourages students to create collaboratively designed fantasy worlds. Inspired by the fanfiction genre, a teacher helps students create a world of interlinking stories and develop more detailed, sophisticated writing through in-depth collaboration. The authors present and discuss three salient forms of…

Current technology provides counseling center clinicians regular and immediate access to the students they work with via social networking. Focusing on Facebook in particular, this article discusses the opportunities and challenges this access creates and specifically explores how utilization of ethical, clinical, and cultural lenses might affect…

Latent variable modeling methods have demonstrated utility for understanding the structure of executive control (EC) across development. These methods are utilized to better characterize the relation between EC and mathematics achievement in the preschool period, and to understand contributing sources of individual variation. Using the sample and…

Purpose: Drawing on social capital theory and self-identification theory, this study aims to examine the associations of two indicators of social capital, personal networks and deep-level similarity, with team capability measures of team efficacy and team potency. The central focus of the study is to be the hypothesized mediating role of team…

The study examines two issues of the relationship between social capital and educational performance: the different effects of bridging and bonding social capital on urban educational performance and the contextual effects of social capital. The main argument states that bonding and bridging social capital are differently related to educational…

The online interaction of learners and tutors in activities with concrete objectives provides a valuable source of data that can be analyzed for different purposes. One of these purposes is the use of the information extracted from that interaction to aid tutors and learners in decision making about either the configuration of further learning…

Background: Young people are susceptible to suicidal behavior as a result of learning about the suicidal behavior of others. This study was designed to determine whether Internet sites, such as online news and social networking websites, expose young people to suicide stories that might increase suicide ideation. Method: We reinterviewed 719 young…

Defined by researchers as "a silent epidemic" the gambling phenomenon is a social problem that has a negative impact on individuals, families and communities. Among these effects, there is exasperating evidence of comprised community networks, a deterioration of family and social ties, psychiatric co-morbidity, suicides and more recently,…

When leaders interact in teams with their subordinates, they build social capital that can have positive effects on team performance. Does this social capital affect team performance because subordinates come to see the leader as charismatic? We answered this question by examining 2 models. First, we tested the charisma-to-centrality model…

A caregiver is one who provides formal or informal services to a person with physical disabilities or a long-term illness. The day-to-day responsibilities place inordinate amounts of stress on caregivers. Thus, caregivers need mental and physical support. Creative movement enables dancers to express anxieties through movement and to experience an…

Mobile learning has become increasingly popular in the past decade due to the unprecedented technological affordances achieved through the advancement of mobile computing, which makes ubiquitous and situated learning possible. At the same time, there have been research and implementation projects whose efforts centered on developing mobile…