Research on the transition of students into Academia has previously focused on intelligence and effort as determinants of success. In this article I will argue that the liminal experience of transition into the academic environment is enhanced by multi-logic spaces where curiosity and focus are key attributes of the academic literacy classroom. In…

The International Consultation, convened in Leiden (the Netherlands) in September 2014, brought together early childhood experts and stakeholders--supported by the International Step by Step Association (ISSA), the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the…

What should parents of gifted young learners expect to see in the early grades? How can parents be supportive, yet advocate for their child's needs? After 25 years of working with parents of young children, the author offers some candid advice: Be kind, be gentle, and be relentless in the pursuit of challenge for the child. In this article the…

As schools, districts, and the overall education system are complex entities, both the approaches taken to improve them and the methods used to study them must be similarly complex. Simple solutions imposed with no regard for schools' or districts' unique contexts hold little promise, while seemingly insignificant differences between those…

Although the theoretical framework of cognitive load theory has acknowledged a role for the learning environment, the specific characteristics of the physical learning environment that could affect cognitive load have never been considered, neither theoretically nor empirically. In this article, we argue that the physical learning environment, and…

In this paper I discuss how students use narratives and photography in order to represent their everyday engagement with the university space. I draw on the Lacanian notions of the Real and the drive, and suggest ways in which these notions can be used to develop a different approach to educational spaces, especially when photographic material is…

This article examines the symbolic boundary work that is carried out at a school whose student population is heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity and class. Based on ethnography, the article demonstrates how the school's staff seeks to neutralize ethnic boundaries and their accompanying discourse, while the pupils try to bring ethnic…

Different methods, strategies, or tools have been proposed for teaching Object Oriented Programming (OOP). However, it is still difficult to introduce OOP to novice learners. The problem may be not only adopting a method or language, but also use of an appropriate integrated development environment (IDE). Therefore, the focus should be on the…

Design research is strongly associated with the learning sciences community, and in the 2 decades since its conception it has become broadly accepted. Yet within and without the learning sciences there remains confusion about how to do design research, with most scholarship on the approach describing what it is rather than how to do it. This…

Linking measurements of the physical environment's physiognomies to human behavior and productivity is a rather new task in the fields of education, and social and natural sciences. In education; for example, how can a schoolhouse and its surroundings be measured such that valid and reliable comparisons can be made among student outcomes? For…

This study employs the Specificity Principle to examine the relative impacts of external (input quantity at home and at school, number of books and reading frequency at home, teachers' degree and experience, language usage, socioeconomic status) and internal factors (children's working memory, nonverbal intelligence, learning-related…

Drawing on qualitative research with adolescent youth of color, this paper imagines the power and potential of informal youth-driven spaces in schools as sites of emotional safety and rebellion. Calling upon Hochshild's (1979) conceptualization of the social regulation of emotions, we examine the racialized and gendered feeling rules that govern…

Schools with dramatically increased immigrant and refugee student populations need a systematic approach and inclusive process to ensure newcomer students, who differ in their backgrounds, languages, identities, frames of reference, prior educational experiences, abilities, interests, and belief systems, have equal opportunities and resources to…

Self-advocacy is linked to the success and retention of students with disabilities in college. Self-advocacy is defined as communicating individual wants, needs, and rights to determine and pursue required accommodations. While self-advocacy is linked to academic success, little is known about how students with disabilities in science, technology,…

In this paper, we explore how language centres can and need to seize the initiative in matters of internationalisation, language policy and supporting a multilingual and multicultural institutional environment. We identify and explore a number of challenges and opportunities, using the situation in the United Kingdom as our example, demonstrating…