Teachers need to expand their understanding of language in order to meet the diverse language and literacy needs of their students. Students may demonstrate deficits in the domains of language form (phonology, morphology, syntax), content (semantics), and use (pragmatics). However, existing studies have only investigated teachers' knowledge of…

We propose an integration of aspects of several developmental and systems of beliefs models of personal epistemology. Qualitatively different positions, including realism, dogmatism, skepticism, and rationalism, are characterized according to individuals' beliefs across three dimensions in a model of epistemic and ontological cognition. This model…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to survey students on their satisfaction with university services and programs in a coeducational Lebanese Catholic higher education institution. The study attempts to relate self-assessed knowledge of the university procedures, rules and regulations on six dimensions of satisfaction, being: academic…

Professional knowledge in teaching is broadly based on personal knowledge. Hence, it is important to build teachers' development out of their initial knowledge. The idea of a sociogenesis of educational knowledge, teacher knowledge and training models as well as teaching models are the basis of this study. It aims to diagnose the knowledge…

Research on children's knowledge of illnesses has largely concentrated on studying how children reason about common innocuous diseases. It is also important to uncover how children reason about more severe diseases, such as cancer, to be able to treat and communicate with children diagnosed with this disease. Several aspects of prevalent childhood…

At the elementary school level, two studies (Eicher, Piersma, & Wood, 1975; Liu 2004) were conducted to investigate school children's knowledge, perceptions, and understanding about China. Findings from these studies implied that the U.S. children's knowledge of China was predominantly related to their exposure to Chinatown or Chinese…

Suicide prevention training for the prison service in England and Wales has been criticized. STORM is a package emphasizing the practice and review of interactions with suicidal persons and was evaluated in a pilot study for use in prisons. Trainees completed questionnaires immediately before and after training and at 6 to 8 months follow-up.…

The aim of this study was to determine the elementary teachers' knowledge about air pollution. Ozone depletion, global warming, acid rain, and renewable energy were also addressed in this study to get holistic picture about air pollution. A total of 183 teachers from the 91 schools in Ankara participated to the study. The data obtained were…

While researching student assumptions for the development of the Biology Concept Inventory (BCI; http://bioliteracy.net), we found that a wide class of student difficulties in molecular and evolutionary biology appears to be based on deep-seated, and often unaddressed, misconceptions about random processes. Data were based on more than 500…

The aim of the study was to compare two samples of sixth-grade Spanish primary students on coordination of writing processes measured by online or direct retrospection techniques and writing products. One group was comprised of 81 students with learning disabilities (LD), the other was made up by 80 typically achieving students. The results showed…

Objectives: To explore factors underlying African Americans' perceptions of oral cancer and the oral cancer exam. Study findings were used to guide development of oral cancer messages designed to increase oral cancer exams among African Americans. Methods: Focus groups were conducted to understand African Americans' attitudes and expectations…

The aims of this study were considered under three headings. The first was to elicit misconception that science and physics student teachers (pre-service teachers) had about the terms, "inertial mass", "gravitational mass", "gravity", "gravitational force" and "weight". The second was to understand how prior learning affected their misconceptions,…

Background: In 2004, in an attempt to address the current obesity epidemic, the United States Department of Health and Human Services announced a strategy to focus on educating the public on the concept of energy balance. The premise of "Calories Count" was that energy balance is primarily a function of calories in (energy in food)…

The rapid growth of biotechnology knowledge during the past decades has made it necessary to rethink the contents of the school curriculum and has provoked a consideration of the ethical and social issues related to the use of biotechnological applications. With the financial assistance of the European Union, the European Initiative for…

In this paper, we explore the use of isomorphic problem pairs (IPPs) to assess introductory physics students' ability to solve and successfully transfer problem-solving knowledge from one context to another in mechanics. We call the paired problems "isomorphic" because they require the same physics principle to solve them. We analyze written…