How do students react to being told that they have failed a test required for high school graduation? In 2000, 7,989 students were wrongly informed that they had failed the Minnesota Basic Standards Test in mathematics. The authors conducted a survey of 911 of these students to assess the psychosocial impact of this event. More than 80% of…

This paper reports on a research study that draws on the perceptions of students, tutors, field centre coordinators and central management to evaluate the support services provided to students in the National Teachers' Institute's distance teacher training programme. Within a conceptual framework that built upon models of teaching and learning…

Expanded newborn screening programs and subsequent detection of rare genetic disorders challenge parents and their medical providers to learn about the treatment and management of these disorders. Many people seek medical information on the Internet but may encounter requests for registration or fees, or find that resources are out of date,…

Professional development for teachers is often described as a journey. This paper, using the findings from a small-scale study interrogating professional development in ICT, offers the alternate metaphor of an interwoven Celtic knot to explain this phenomenon. It will show how the four key elements identified as being critical to creating the most…

National priorities set by an Australian ministerial taskforce provide clear guidelines to develop pedagogy that integrates ICT. Although these guidelines do not specifically address rural and regional school needs, the two priorities: promoting pedagogic leadership and creating new learning environments, are of particular interest. But how are…

Rather than learning and then applying theory to the solution of problems, learners can be provided with stories about others' experiences while designing classroom instruction. However, the usability of case-libraries has not been documented with teachers. In this study, students accessed a case-library of technology integration stories…

Literacy is important not only to school success but is fundamental to skills needed to succeed in our rapidly changing technology-driven society. This article focuses on characteristics, interactions, and attitudes of parents and children related to their use of assistive technologies to build literacy skills. Interviews and observations…

In software engineering education, large projects are widely recognized as a useful way of exposing students to the real-world difficulties of team software development. But large projects are difficult to put into practice. First, educators rarely have additional time to manage software projects. Second, classrooms have inherent limitations that…

In the West African Region of Africa, the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) is the first full fledged university that operates in an exclusively open and distance learning (ODL) mode of education. NOUN focuses mainly on open and distance teaching and learning system, and delivers its courses materials via print in conjunction with…

Faced with the need to teach English to a large number of students, the "Universidad de Concepcion," Chile, has created an innovative Communicative English Program using ICT, which is made up of four modules covered in four academic terms. The English program aims to develop integrated linguistic skills with a focus on learning for…

Despite large investments by higher education institutions in technology for faculty and student use, instructional technology is not being integrated into instruction in higher education institutions including medical education institutions. While the diffusion of instructional technologies has reached a saturation point among early adopters of…

Spelling pronunciations are hypothesized to be helpful in building up relatively stable phonologically underpinned orthographic representations, particularly for learning words with irregular phoneme-grapheme correspondences. In a four-week computer-based training, the efficacy of spelling pronunciations and previewing the spelling patterns on…

A variety of barriers relating to resources, institutional and administrative policies, skills development and attitudes can hinder the effectiveness of technology professional development resulting in underutilized technology resources and lack of integration of those resources within instruction. Multiple methods were used to evaluate the…

This article describes the rationale for a first-year seminar for international students and reports the findings of a study examining its effectiveness. The seminar focuses on four primary objectives: (a) policies and procedures of the university's English as a Second Language (ESL) program; (b) university policies and American higher education;…

Providing choice to individual students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has previously been demonstrated (in single-subject research) to reduce undesirable behavior but has failed to demonstrate gains that are independent of task difficulty or interests/ preferences. We examined choice of feedback type on a computerized math…