This study was designed to investigate the effects of two instructional approaches (4C-ID versus conventional) on learners' knowledge-acquisition and learning transfer of the electrical circuits content in Physics. Participants were 129 9th graders from a secondary school in Lisbon, M = 14.3 years, SD = 0.54. The participants were divided in two…

Absenteeism has been a common and very extended problem in university spheres for several years. This problem has become a permanent feature in academic studies in general, yet it has received scarce empirical research attention. This work is focused on the analysis of the factors that determine university absenteeism. It evaluates a series of…

Part of a larger initiation mixed methods study (Greene, Caracelli, & Graham, 1989), this paper discusses the changes in young children's learning performance and efficiency (one element of the quantitative portion of the larger study) during clinical interviews in which each child interacted with a variety of virtual manipulative…

Given the wide range of options for students to further their education online, it is important to determine what factors impact overall student perceptions of online course quality. Specifically, the study validates the reliability of Merrill's (2012) First Principles of Instruction as factors that impact students' perceptions of online course…

An alternating treatments design was used to compare the effects of two reading fluency interventions on the oral reading fluency and maze accuracy of four fourth-grade students. Also, by taking into account time spent in intervention, the efficiency of the two interventions was compared. In the adult-mediated repeated reading (RR) condition,…

Drawing upon cultural-historical activity theory, this research analyzed the structural contradictions existing in a variety of educational activities among a group of alienated adult students in Korea National Open University (KNOU). Despite KNOU's quantitative development in student enrollment, the contradictions shed light on how the…

Information and communication technology (ICT) is one of the most important driving forces promoting economic growth in the economy. However, one puzzling question concerns the efficient and effective impact of ICT on educational outputs and outcomes. Therefore, the purpose of the paper is to discuss and review some previous research studies on…

The study investigated teacher knowledge of error analysis in differential calculus. Two teachers were the sample of the study: one a subject specialist and the other a mathematics education specialist. Questionnaires and interviews were used for data collection. The findings of the study reflect that the teachers' knowledge of error analysis was…

This paper analyses the efficiency of higher education in equalizing the feasible wages obtained for men and women in the labour market. To do that, It is estimated two stochastic frontiers. The first one measures the effect of higher education inside the group of men and women for six European countries. The results indicate that in Denmark,…

This article concentrates on the policy reforms of schools in England, Germany, France and Italy, from 1988 to 2009, with a focus on the introduction of market accountability. Pressing demands for organisational change in schools, shaped by the objectives of "efficiency" and competition, which were introduced in England in the 1980s,…

The reforms of middle and primary school teaching that have been launched in mainland China over the past thirty years have been manifested in different ways and in different periods of time. The first to appear were localized and scattered teaching reforms oriented toward efficiency, after which commenced explorative teaching experiments in…

In this study we examined how the introduction of a parallel finger-tapping task influences second language (L2) speech encoding mechanisms and monitoring processes, and how the level of proficiency impacts the efficiency and accuracy of L2 performance under single and dual task conditions. The results indicate that imposing dual task demands had…

Although outcomes assessment (OA) has become "common sense" in higher education, this article shows that the concept of "outcomes" tends to limit and compromise teaching and learning while serving the interests of institutional management. By contrast, the pragmatic concept of consequences tends to expand our view of teaching and learning, and…

This article makes the case that cost functions are the best available methodology for ensuring consistency between a state's educational accountability system and its education finance system. Because they are based on historical data and well-known statistical methods, cost functions are a particularly flexible and low-cost way to forecast what…

In the coming years, California will need a growing supply of educated workers to meet the demands of a dynamic state economy, and this supply will must come from populations that have historically been underrepresented in higher education. The higher education sector will need strong state policy leadership focused on the long-term success of the…