Sport scientists have examined numerous factors influencing the acquisition and manifestation of high levels of performance. These factors can be divided into variables having a primary influence on expertise and variables that have a secondary influence through their interaction with other variables. Primary influences on expertise include…

This paper maintains that post Lave and Wenger VET has overlooked the relation between vocational curricula and workplace practice. The paper attributes this oversight to Kant's legacy in the "situated" tradition in VET and critics of that tradition. The paper argues that when Vygotsky's concept of mediation is allied to the recent work of Robert…

This essay responds to the problem that sociocultural literacy research has failed to adequately theorize individual literacy learners as moral agents with the capacity to produce harm or good to themselves and others. Building from the rhetorical construct of dialogism, this inquiry explores how the early ethical thought of Mikhail Bakhtin can…

This paper addresses value changes that have occurred to college-educated youth as China is going through drastic social transformations under Western influences. It explains how socio-economic and cultural forces interplay within a particular historical and political context in bringing about such notable changes as individualism, materialism and…

Perspectives in global education are ever changing. Multiculturalism, which emphasized differences, has given way to education for inclusion, which holds personal heritage as invaluable texture, but also respects the fact that identity is a personal adventure shaped by many forces. Educators who promote a global perspective apply a variety of…

Sociocultural theories of learning provide an analytical lens for exploring faculty work. By conceptualizing faculty work as a learning process that is both cognitive and social, sociocultural perspectives highlight the ways in which faculty learning and work are enabled and shaped by the contexts in which they occur, but also how learning and…

Adolescent prostitution is a particular social phenomenon characterized by the fact that adolescents (those under the age of eighteen), either females or males, engage more than once (at least two times) in extramarital sexual relations with a large number of people for some particular (material) consideration owing to social, economic,…

Traditionally, transmission of cultural knowledge between generations in Micronesia was the role of family, in particular parents and grand parents. To what extent is that role still important today? In this article, we draw on data obtained from questionnaires distributed to high school and primary school children throughout Micronesia in 2002…

This article presents the results of two studies; the first of which offers insight into how three African American boys did and did not utilize a critical literacy stance to interpret texts while the second gives specific suggestions for how teachers might select and use texts in ways that foster students' critical literacy abilities. Results…

In this study, we propose a set of concepts for conceptualizing issues of learning science related to globalization, the encounter with the (radically) foreign/strange--as this occurs as part of migration and even as part of the encounter of a learner with the unknown content that science lessons are to impart--from the perspective of the…

Among American Indian Pueblo tribes, community-based language revitalisation initiatives have been established in response to a growing language shift towards English. This has been most prominent among school age children, prompting some tribes to extend tribal language programmes into local public schools. For centuries, the transmission of…

Sociocultural theories propose that social context and more experienced cultural members are integral to children's development and enculturation into their communities. However, the argument is made that the current Western cultural and structural arrangement of group public child care impedes the successful implementation of sociocultural-based…

This article seeks to explore how a sociocultural approach to learning can change pedagogy in the teaching of second language literacy. As a first step, the changing notions of first language literacy are acknowledged. Vygotsky's notion of everyday and schooled concepts is then used to understand research data gathered in a Year 9 Japanese…

This paper revisits a successful short-course in academic literacy that was conducted for 50 "disadvantaged" students enrolled in the first year of an education degree at an Australian regional university (see Hirst, Henderson, Allan, Bode & Kocatepe, 2004). Based on a sociocultural approach to learning and drawing on a…

In two experiments we demonstrate a substantial cross-cultural difference in a mnemonic context effect, whereby a magnitude estimate of a simple stimulus such as a line or circle is biased toward the center of the distribution of previously seen instances of the same class. In support of the hypothesis that Asians are more likely than Americans to…