Public debates about the role of teachers and teacher performance place teachers at the center of a range of national and local discourses. The notion of teacher professional identity, therefore, framed in a variety of ways, engages people across social contexts, whether as educators, parents, students, taxpayers, voters or consumers of news and…

Purpose: The leadership of the principal is known to be a key factor in supporting student achievement, but how that leadership is experienced and instructionally enacted by teachers is much less clear. The purpose of this study was to examine various factors that are often present in principal-teacher interactions and teacher-teacher…

This study assesses the perceived role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) including the Internet, mobile telephone, CD/MD/MP3, television and VCR/VCD/DVD in raising quality of life (QoL). A comparison is made between three Chinese cities, namely, Beijing, Taipei and Hong Kong, to see if differences exist in the perceived value of…

Although communication and social difficulties in autism have received a great deal of research attention, the other key diagnostic feature, extreme repetitive behaviour and unusual narrow interests, has been addressed less often. Also known as "resistance to change" this may be related to atypical processing of infrequent, novel stimuli. This can…

The general magnocellular theory postulates that dyslexia is the consequence of a multimodal deficit in the processing of transient and dynamic stimuli. In the auditory modality, this deficit has been hypothesized to interfere with accurate speech perception, and subsequently disrupt the development of phonological and later reading and spelling…

In this article, I examine the role of teacher racial identity on teaching strategy and the treatment of race in classroom discussions. I explicate how the pattern of minimizing the negative racial comments made to English language learners played out in participants' teaching and how it is reflective of socially constructed notions of race and…

Purpose: This paper seeks to examine the roles of personality, vocational interests, academic achievement and some socio-cultural factors in educational aspirations of secondary school adolescents in southwestern Nigeria. Design/methodology/approach: A survey research design was adopted. The sample comprised 430 (males = 220, females = 210)…

The intent of this article is to generate thought and discussion about Alberta Education's Daily Physical Activity (DPA) initiative. Compelling reasons as to why the implementation process may be considered problematic are presented as the role and influence of institutional discourse in the implementation of new programming is explored. Through a…

This article suggests that the union learning representative (ULR) is increasingly situated at the heart of trade union activity. The paper draws upon recent research based on interviews with national trade union officers and case studies of union learning activity to explore the competing demands being made upon ULRs and the implications for…

This qualitative case study reports and interprets school principals' perceptions of their role in implementing and sustaining Second Step, a social skills development programme. The study compares schools that implemented the programme as a formalised strategy for all teachers and those that did not. The results suggest that the key features of…

This article explores the changing career trajectories of teaching assistants who graduated from a university in the northwest of England with a Foundation degree in Supporting Teaching and Learning. It begins with a consideration of the changing policy context in England in relation to the role of support staff in schools. This context informed…

The shrinking number of new entrants into the U.S. workforce and the smaller proportion of new workers who are well-educated will put organizations dependent on highly qualified personnel in competition for the short supply of qualified individuals. Thus, recruiting strategies will be of increasing concern to many organizations. The research…

This paper reviews two studies of color preference and the relationships between color and legibility. The Gustin study in 1991 dealt with the legibility of and preference for projected slides with colored backgrounds and white text. The order of background color preference was cyan, blue, green, yellow, magenta, and red. The follow-up study by…

This study focused on auditory perception, or phonetic discrimination, in foreign language learning. Subjects of the study were English-speakers (n=35) learning French. Researchers measured subjects' auditory sensibility, comparing it with progress in phonetic discrimination during the school year. Progress in the latter was measured by both a…

This study examined changes in infants' performance in detecting tones as a funtion of time. Stimuli were presented in blocks of fixed frequency and intensity, rather than in random order. The findings of earlier studies that an observer can reliably tell from a 1-month-old's behavior when a pure tone is being presented, and that reinforcement of…