Digital media and open educational resources (OER) are said to redraw the boundaries between learners and teachers, by weakening the centralization of expertise and the distribution of subject-matter authority. This paper presents the findings of an ethnographic study of how the use of OER mediates the relations between self-directed learners and…

Although expectations for graduate students' writing abilities are high, their actual writing skills are often subpar (Cuthbert & Spark, 2008; Singleton-Jackson, Lumsden, & Newson, 2009), even though academic writing is considered integral to graduate education and necessary for career preparedness (e.g., Mullen, 2006; Stevens, 2005).…

This paper reflects on the emergence of an impact agenda and its incorporation as a feature of the academic contract in UK universities. It focuses on the depositions of senior academic managers across a range of social science research centres, as they critically reflect upon their organizational strategy for capturing and communicating the…

In this paper, I will discuss how to enhance Japanese teacher education. After sketching teacher education from the mid-1940s to the 1960s, I sum up the main topics people discussed through each decade of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. Illustrating some of the current topics of teacher education in the first decade of the new century, I discuss what…

Focusing on the working community, this article concentrates on the newly qualified foreign language teachers' (NQT) experiences and on factors that promoted or prevented the development of professional expertise at the outset of their working life. It draws on a qualitative longitudinal study conducted at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland,…

This study investigates the impact of being the only composition scholar on writing program administrators' work, relationships, and identities. The study data illuminates the experiences of a segment of the writing program administration population that is currently underrepresented: writing program administrators who are also the only…

Governments around the world are calling for a revival of apprenticeship on a large scale, emphasizing the value of the one-on-one, human interaction between master and apprentice and the teaching involved in that interaction. Although a broader historical view of apprenticeship shares these ideas, certain prominent threads within recent…

The famous Polgar sisters started chess very young, undertook extensive study, and two became grandmasters. This case often is cited as decisive evidence that practice alone is key in development of expertise, that innate talent is unimportant or non-existent, and that almost anyone can become a grandmaster. But on close examination these claims…

Echolocation is a specialized application of spatial hearing that uses reflected auditory information to localize objects and represent the external environment. Although it has been documented extensively in nonhuman species, such as bats and dolphins, its use by some persons who are blind as a navigation and object-identification aid has…

Since tenure decisions concern the award of an employment guarantee, the burden of proof ought to rest on the candidate; in cases of doubt, the vote should be negative. However, a number of corrosive tendencies often weaken the strict application of this principle. To counteract these tendencies, this article advocates a strategy of pre-commitment…

The authors find Critchfield's article ("Translational Contributions of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior," "The Behavior Analyst," v34, p3-17, 2011) scholarly, clear, and insightful. In it, Critchfield provides an excellent overview of translational research in behavior analysis and suggests several general strategies for increasing the…

I start by introducing some ideas from the field of science and technology studies that concern the difficulty of differentiating experts and laypeople. Based on this description I react to Albaek's comment and further explain the approach taken in my study. The results of the study indicate that the function of different types of sources can vary…

Background/Context: Prior research on "Milliken v. Bradley" focuses on the failure of this case to implement interdistrict busing in the highly segregated Detroit schools. Much of this work focuses explicitly on desegregation, rather than on equity and addressing individual, systemic, institutional, and organizational challenges that may…

Within Aotearoa/New Zealand primary schools, External Providers (EPs) have steadily increased their influence on physical education. The purpose of this study was to explore and interpret classroom teachers' perspectives of EPs in their primary school. The research team obtained questionnaire responses from 487 classroom teachers from 133…

Given prior research indicating that teachers can learn through their social network interactions with colleagues, it is important to understand more about the choices teachers make about whom to go to for advice. In this study, we investigated the degree to which middle school mathematics teachers change from whom they seek advice when…