As part of state transitions to college- and career-ready (CCR) standards, including the Common Core State Standards in more than 40 states (NGA & CCSSO, 2010), states are for the first time administering new summative assessments aligned to those standards and aiming for a higher bar in assessment quality. For a majority of states, this means…

This paper presents an e-collaboration project involving real-time videoconferencing exchanges between students from the University of Westminster and the Université Catholique de Lille. Students drew on diverse resources, including written quantitative data and first-hand qualitative data in French/English to complete weekly tasks. Follow-up work…

The abstract of research papers is one of the first things that a reader will read to determine the value of the research. A well-written abstract will surely promote the text attached to it more effectively. By examining the rhetorical moves in the abstracts of Chinese Master's English theses and published research articles in applied…

Informal learning communities in which participants show critically reflective work behaviour (CRWB) have the potential to support lifelong learning. In practice this behaviour does not always occur in groups of autonomous professionals. This study explores design principles (DPs) that could act as social affordances for CRWB, within the context…

The Museum Education Association of New Zealand (MEANZ) and the National Services Te Paerangi (NSTP) set up a pilot mentoring programme for museum educators in New Zealand. The overall goals for the programme were to: (1) facilitate professional relationships between museum educators who are in need of information and assistance and those who can…

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) seeks to provide educators, policymakers, researchers, and the public with a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education. The WWC was established in 2002 by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES). It serves as a decision-making resource by…

Virtual environments, virtual worlds, simulations, 3D models are loaded with potential, promise, and problems. While learning in virtual settings is still being researched, instructional designers are challenged as to which instructional design practices are best suited for virtual environments (VEs). The problem is there is a lack of a conceptual…

Pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is one of the most critical components in teaching expertise. It helps understand the crucial points that teaching is more than just delivering subject content knowledge to students, and that student learning is considerably more than absorbing information. Since the seminal studies of Shulman (1986, 1987), a…

Laboratory instruction is critical to the understanding of biology and is a central piece of biological sciences instruction. Although much investigation has focused on the content of biology laboratory exercises, we contend that understanding the extent to which the laboratory materials can aid or limit experimental investigation is of equal…

This article is the author's Distinguished Lecture presented at the 2010 Annual Conference of the American Association for Agricultural Education (AAAE), in Omaha, Nebraska, on May 25, 2010. In this lecture, the author looks back at the significant changes in agricultural education in the last 100 or so years and discusses four major ways that one…

Peer learning has already existed for a long time, as an informal as well as a formal practice between people from the same professional area. However, peer learning systems on the macro level are relatively newer concepts. Policy learning can be fostered by various types of organised activities, ranging from peer review frameworks, which often…

It is argued that future research capacity building for the social sciences needs to incorporate methods to accelerate the acquisition by researchers of holistic expertise relevant to their roles as researchers and as developers of others. An agenda is presented, based on a model of learning that highlights missing elements of current provision,…

Faces of one's own race are discriminated and recognized more accurately than faces of an other race (other-race effect--ORE). Studies have employed several methods to enhance individuation and recognition of other-race faces and reduce the ORE, including intensive perceptual training with other-race faces and explicitly instructing participants…

Hopelessness has become an increasingly important construct in palliative care research, yet concerns exist regarding the utility of existing measures when applied to patients with a terminal illness. This article describes a series of studies focused on the exploration, development, and analysis of a measure of hopelessness specifically intended…

During the interwar years of the early twentieth century, and through at least the 1980s, education was seen by scholars, state leaders, and international agency representatives alike as a way to modernize and secularize underdeveloped communities. Arguments about the modernizing power of education did not erase or discount the presence of…