This article discusses the social fabrication of risk and ill health in the United Kingdom and how it affect the physical education curriculum and physical education teachers. It is now well over 60 years since the publication in Britain of the Board of Education?s (1933) "Syllabus For Physical Training For Schools." It was a remarkable…

Evidence from developed Western societies is reviewed for the claims that (a) physical attractiveness judgments are substantially based on body size and shape, symmetry, sex-typical hormonal markers, and other specific cues and (b) physical attractiveness and these cues substantially predict health. Among the cues that the authors review, only…

The sociocultural paradigm in educational research, emphasizing the situatedness of learning and the embeddedness of thought in cultural and linguistic practices, has called into question the plausibility of the enterprise of teaching general thinking skills. In this paper I argue that the sociocultural research programme needs an adequate…

The global rescaling of the world, culture, and education has influenced how people experience their situationality, meaning-making, and learning in relation to the Other. This article explores the implications of spatial analysis for rethinking education in new conditions of cultural complexity. The experience of living and learning with…

This paper is a reconsideration of the nature of teaching and learning in the language teacher education course room. Drawing broadly on sociocultural perspectives of Lave and Wenger and Vygotskian models of cognitive apprenticeship, it considers how to design the course room as a learning environment. It begins with a critique of…

The paper reports on parental involvement in Chinese students' language learning which has emerged as a major finding from an interpretative enquiry into their English-learning experiences. The data confirm that Chinese parents and other family members are closely involved in the study participants' language learning, in particular, their…

In this paper we examine the contention that many schools and school boards use funding generated from testing and coding of students with special needs as a means of augmenting general operating revenues. As a result, students with special needs do not receive the full benefit of the monies received for individualized programs. The article draws…

This study investigates Chinese immigrant high school students' perceptions of cooperative learning and their interactions during cooperative learning activities in English as a second language (ESL) classes. The findings present a complex picture of cooperative learning in the ESL classroom. The interview results demonstrate that the Chinese…

This article examines key issues in lecturer development programmes (LDPs) in Scottish higher education institutions, within the context of the national standards established recently for those who teach in United Kingdom higher education (HE). Many of the LDPs were developed in response to the Dearing Committee recommendations that university…

This paper takes a sociocultural approach to exploring the factors that enhance young children's bilingual development. The language excerpts presented were gathered as part of a three-year Early Childhood Centre of Innovation project funded by the New Zealand government. Data gathered in this project challenge Krashen's (1981) position that young…

This study aimed to draw upon a sociocultural perspective for elucidating the process and outcome of peer learning interactions between young adults with serious learning disabilities. A heterogeneous group of ten young adults between ages of 18 and 27 participated in the year-long cognitive program based on the principles of Feuerstein's theory…

Numerous studies have shown that thinking aloud while reading can be an effective instructional technique in helping students improve their reading comprehension. However, most of the studies that examined the effects of think-aloud involve subjects reading individually and carried out in isolation away from the classroom context. Recently,…

The present research investigated the effects of an interdisciplinary program on Chinese music and culture, based on a sociocultural approach to multicultural music education. The program was introduced to 250 fifth- and sixth-grade children in three schools in New York, USA. Reports and questionnaires were collected from the teachers, students,…

This study sought to ascertain how the press covers higher education and how public research universities work with the press to advance their agendas. It examined the coverage that eight newspapers devoted to six public research universities, namely the Universities of Pittsburgh, Colorado (Boulder), Minnesota, California (Berkeley), and…

After a century of fairly steady decline, the official poverty rate among American children increased from 14.0% in 1969 to 19.6% in 1989, suggesting that the United States is losing the war on poverty. However, once various defects in the official poverty measure are corrected, it appears that the proportion of children in households with income…