High school is boring, writes the author, in part because lock-step diploma requirements crowd out personalized and engaged learning. It is also boring because current content standards are based on traditional, subject-area notions of curriculum instead of on the essential question, What do students need to be well prepared for their adult lives?…

Corporate Learning and Development must align learning goals with the needs of the business it serves. In times of rapid change and limitless information, it becomes unreasonable to expect a Learning and Development group to design for and deliver all the learning its workforce needs. In response, corporate learning leaders are exploring if and…

The American College Testing Program (ACT) reported that approximately 48% of students who enroll in college depart after their first year. Nontraditional students have a higher departure rate than traditional students. One such nontraditional group of students consists of female spouses of military personnel. These spouses are frequently involved…

What is school reform? What makes it sustainable? Who needs to be involved? How is scaling up achieved? This book is about the need for educational reforms that have built into them, from the outset, those elements that will see them sustained in the original sites and spread to others. Using the Te Kotahitanga Project as a model the authors…

When planning a lesson, many teachers will start by listing content-based objectives; after all, this is how the majority of textbooks, schemes of work and lesson planning templates are constructed. This is understandable, as for many years now teachers have been legally required to teach the national curriculum which was a list of content-based…

Across the United States many chemistry departments are engaged in developing assessment plans. New guidelines from the American Chemical Society (ACS) Committee on Professional Training request a department's latest self-assessment and a plan for acting on the recommendations. This manuscript describes assessment practices at institutions ranging…

Videogames are a powerful medium that curriculum designers can use to create narratively rich worlds for achieving educational goals. In these worlds, youth can become scientists, doctors, writers, and mathematicians who critically engage complex disciplinary content to transform a virtual world. Toward illuminating this potential, the authors…

Students often have an oversimplified view of biological facts, which may hinder subsequent understanding when conceptual complexity gives rise to cognitive conflicts. To avoid this situation here, we present a PBL approach for the analysis of Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), which integrates a variety of topics in cell biology, genetics, and…

Purpose: Training is a key strategy for human resources development and in achieving organisational objectives. Organisations and public authorities invest large amounts of resources in training, but rarely have the data to show the results of that investment. Only a few organisations evaluate training in depth due to the difficulty involved and…

Objective: The authors studied the factors affecting the recruitment into child and adolescent psychiatry training in the United States. Methods: Medical students (n = 154) and general and child and adolescent psychiatry residents (n = 111) completed a questionnaire to evaluate career choice in child psychiatry (n = 265). Results: Compared with…

In this response to the commentaries, the author makes some general observations on the nature of the Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning (IFLL) and "Learning Through Life" ("LTL"): their design and purpose. He then turns to the comments from the "International Journal of Lifelong Education"…

From the biographical perspective of her own career as a curriculum developer and university lecturer, the author explores how the present day curriculum for primary and lower secondary education has developed, and which values and principles have determined curriculum decisions during more than 15 years. Curriculum, with its apparatus of learning…

Recent research in England suggests that opportunities for children's and young people's reading for pleasure may have been curtailed as a result of other curriculum imperatives. Under pressure to raise standards, there has been a strong emphasis on meeting objectives and managing the curriculum, but reasons for reading in the first place appear…

The Lidcombe Program is a behavioral treatment for early stuttering which is implemented by parents, typically the mother. Despite this, there is limited detailed knowledge about mothers' experiences of administering the treatment. This article describes the findings of a qualitative study which explored the experiences of 16 mothers during their…

Studying in higher education requires long-term commitment. Previous studies have shown that commitment, perceived competence, intrinsic motivation and work-life orientation are positively related to academic achievement. This study examines the kinds of goals theology students have at the beginning of studies, and whether these goals are related…