Roles can be assigned to occurrences of variables in programs according to a small number of stereotypical patterns of use. Studies on explicitly teaching roles to novices learning programming have shown that roles are an excellent pedagogical tool for clarifying the structure and meaning of programs and that their use improves students'…

This study gathered information regarding professional military educators' perceptions of the concept of critical thinking to determine whether there was a common definition and a shared meaning of the concept among them. Although there did not appear to be a common definition of critical thinking among this group, 10 categories and four themes…

This paper seeks to reframe the idea of an educated public as construed by Alasdair MacIntyre in his lecture of 1985. Like MacIntyre, it locates the emergence of an educated public in the Scottish Enlightenment and its universities, but its focus is on aspects which are not brought into focus by MacIntyre's narrative. The paper argues, firstly,…

The latent power of social work's position at the centre of welfare services and as a coordinator and definer of social realities can be argued to have led social work to become "the assessment profession". Building upon a critique of the key distinction between "description and prescription", we argue that the…

This paper investigates intercultural communication and its significance to higher education. The paper briefly discusses culture, subculture and the meeting of cultures. It also provides a brief survey of developments in intercultural communication research. With reference to New Zealand, the paper further points to some limitations of…

Much of the emphasis on the learning of subject leaders in secondary schools is placed on what Eraut (2000) terms "organised formal learning events". This article attempts to redress the balance by focusing on the somewhat neglected area of their informal learning about the role, which is predominantly based in the workplace. It is argued that…

This essay suggests a way for creating a curriculum for the future amidst the challenges of post-modern uncertainty. Curriculum discourse in the past has been dominated by widely-accepted key questions, which produce and maintain curricula that are essentially fragmented and reductionistic, and directly opposed to the essential demands of the…

The present study draws on environmental science education to explore aspects of children's conceptual change regarding hazardous household items. Twelve children from a fifth-grade class attended a 300-h teaching module of environmentally oriented science activities aimed at assessing their awareness about the environmental and health hazards…

This submission contains the Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group (CMESG), held at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. The CMESG is a group of mathematicians and mathematics educators who meet annually to discuss mathematics education issues at all levels of learning. The aims…

Hypermedia as a learning environment complements traditional instruction as it places the student at a higher level of control. Instead of "wait and see" what the teacher expects the student to learn next, hypermedia stimulates the student to become aware of his/her own cognitive needs and interests. This paper presents a combination of notions…

In educational psychology research the concept "prior knowledge" is not always clearly described, but it is important to distinguish prior knowledge state (PKS) components as well as possible and to elucidate the relations among these elements. An in-case-study was conducted into the operationalizing of the concept of prior knowledge and…

A major goal of instruction is for students to develop competence with numbers. This study attempts to determine the effect of instructional materials that develop number concepts and connect these concepts to mental computation procedures. The study used 16 classes of eighth-grade students and a pretest-posttest design with two treatment groups.…

A study analyzed documents developed through major studies, commissions, and research efforts in pharmacy education to determine the conceptual frameworks upon which health profession education programs are built. Researchers conducted a content analysis of each document by organizing the sentences, words, and phrases contained in separate units…

This research focuses on the graphics calculator in calculus and its impact on students' abilities to work with graphical, numerical, and symbolic representations. Three courses are compared, two of which are taught with less emphasis on the use of graphing calculators. The format of the course emphasizing calculator use is more traditional than…

This paper describes a study of whether and how collaborative learning at the computer fosters conceptual change. A suite of computer simulation programs developed to confront students' alternative conceptions in mechanics was integrated into a grade 10 science class in a high school in Melbourne, Australia. A Conceptual Test was administered as a…