This study explored how young children interact with their peers in the computer area of a public kindergarten classroom. Children's social interaction, as defined in this study, is the action of giving and taking information that results in children's knowledge construction and cognitive development that can be accomplished through peer-to-peer…

One obstacle to industrial technology education is that the difficulties or problems students encounter during experiments are not easy to detect. Students are often unaware of their flaws, and some will not notify the teacher of these flaws even if they are aware of them. Consequently, many opportunities to rectify these flaws and improve…

Purpose: Benchmarking, a method for quality assurance has not been very commonly used in higher education with regard to e-learning. Today, e-learning is an integral part of higher education, and so should also be an integral part of quality assurance systems. However, quality indicators, benchmarks and critical success factors on e-learning have…

The objective of this research was to identify Facione's six critical thinking skills using graduate students blogs as a reflection tool in the context of leadership using structured and unstructured blogs. The skills researched were (a) Interpretation, (b) Analysis, (c) Evaluation, (d) Inference, (e) Explanation, and (f) Self-Regulation (Facione,…

Years ago, as personal computers and other technological advancements began to find their way into classrooms and other educational settings, teachers and administrators sought ways to use new technology to benefit students. The potential for improving education was clear, but the limitations of the available education technology made it difficult…

A technique for automatic error analysis using interval mathematics is introduced. A comparison to standard error propagation methods shows that in cases involving complicated formulas, the interval approach gives comparable error estimates with much less effort. Several examples are considered, and numerical errors are computed using the INTLAB…

New representational technologies, such as virtual microscopy, create new affordances for medical education. In the article, a study on the following two issues is reported: (a) How does collaborative use of virtual microscopy shape students' engagement with and learning from virtual slides of tissue specimen? (b) How do visual and conceptual cues…

Students tend to procrastinate. In particular, Computer Science students tend to reduce the number of hours devoted to study concepts after class. In this paper, a case study on the use of Blended Learning to encourage Computer Science students to study is described. Furthermore, an experiment in which the reaction of 131 Computer Science…

This study explored the use of machine learning to automatically evaluate the accuracy of students' written explanations of evolutionary change. Performance of the Summarization Integrated Development Environment (SIDE) program was compared to human expert scoring using a corpus of 2,260 evolutionary explanations written by 565 undergraduate…

Student reliance on social media is undeniable. However, while we largely regard social media as a new phenomena, the concepts underlying it come directly from social network theory in sociology and organizational behavior. In this article, the authors examine how the social network concepts of size, quality, complexity, diffusion, and distance…

Recent studies have increasingly favoured contextualisation of religious education (RE) to pupils' home faith background in spite of current assessment methods that might hinder this. For a multi-religious, multi-ethnic sample of 369 London school pupils aged from 13 to 15 years, this study found that the participatory, transformative and…

Although computer assisted learning (CAL) is becoming increasingly popular, people with visual impairment face greater difficulty in accessing computer-assisted learning facilities. This is primarily because most of the current CAL facilities are not visually impaired friendly. People with visual impairment also do not normally have access to…

When one thinks of the amazing creatures of Antarctica, an insect probably does not come to mind. But this unlikely animal, and a scientific expedition to Antarctica, was the foundation for a learning event that created a community of learners spanning kindergarten through sixth grade and extended beyond the classroom. Miami University's Antarctic…

The purpose of this work was to investigate ways in which everyday computers can be used in schools to fulfil several of the roles of more expensive, specialized laboratory equipment for teaching and learning purposes. The brief adopted was to keep things as straightforward as possible so that any school science department with a few basic tools…

The authors suggest that writing should be conceived of not only as a verbal activity but also as a visuospatial activity, in which writers process and construct visuospatial mental representations. After briefly describing research on visuospatial cognition, they look at how cognitive researchers have investigated the visuospatial dimension of…