Children's picture books that recreate, parody, or fictionalize famous artworks and introduce the art museum experience, a genre to which I will refer as "children's art books," have become increasingly popular over the past decade. This essay explores the pedagogical implications of this trend through the family program "Picture Books and Picture…

Though the majority of students make a successful transition to higher level education, mass education and the strategic marketing of universities have seen academic interest in the transition process receive significant attention in recent years. In Ireland, following two years of focused examination preparation, students are considerably…

This article considers the value of flexibility and free choice in learning, and examines the increasing recognition of the evolving and wide range of appropriate environments for learning, such as the workplace, the home, the community, and the virtual world. This "Lifeplace Learning" is compared to the requirements and visions of the…

Assessment of Prior Learning (APL) refers to a process where adults' prior learning, formal as well as informal, is assessed and acknowledged. In the first section of this paper, APL and current conceptions of validity in assessments and its evaluation are presented. It is argued that participants in the assessment are an important source of…

The cyclic process of self-regulated learning has been identified as a predictor of achievement in musical skill acquisition and musical performance. Meta-cognition, intrinsic to the self-regulation process, develops as the student takes greater responsibility for their own learning. From this perspective we consider music students' responses to a…

We synthesize ideas from the foregoing articles in this special issue and from the broader literature on transfer to explore several themes. In many ordinary life circumstances, transfer proceeds easily, but formal learning often shows much less transfer than educators would like, making failure to transfer a focus of investigation. Transfer, like…

This article considers the underachievement of RPL in the Australian vocational education and training (VET) system, in terms of its apparent failure to reach and achieve outcomes for marginalised groups. It notes a range of analyses that are currently used to address this concern and draws on doctoral research in progress to highlight ontological…

Grasping the dynamics of molecular phenomenon appears to be rather challenging for students in the context of life science. To pursue the origin of such difficulties this paper investigates students' (n = 43) meaning making, in interaction with peers and an animation, of the dynamic process of ATP-synthase. To support this inquiry we introduce the…

Solving new problems can be made easier if one can build on experiences with other problems one has already successfully solved. The ability to exploit earlier problem-solving experiences in solving new problems seems to require several cognitive sub-abilities. Minimally, one needs to be able to retrieve relevant knowledge of earlier solved…

The purpose of this qualitative case study was to investigate the insights of a small group of women to determine factors important in encouraging creative confidence and specific activities that would contribute to creative growth. There were three research questions that guided the study, using an open-ended questionnaire and a focus group…

Think-aloud and self-report data from 65 undergraduates were used to examine the effect of feedback on self-regulation during learning with hypermedia. Participants, randomly assigned to one of three conditions (Control, Questions, Questions+Feedback), used hypermedia for 30 minutes to learn about the circulatory system. Results indicated that…

This article reports an analysis of 44 prospective middle school mathematics teachers' pre-existing knowledge of rigid geometric transformations, specifically the geometric translations. The main data source for this study was the participants' responses to the tasks that were presented during semi-structured clinical interviews. The findings of…

The effects of epistemic beliefs and text structure on cognitive processes during comprehension of scientific texts were investigated. On-line processes were measured using think-aloud (Experiment 1) and reading time (Experiment 2) methodologies. Measures of off-line comprehension, prior knowledge and epistemic beliefs were obtained. Results…

Much research has explored the extent to which statistical computations account for the extraction of linguistic information. However, it remains to be studied how language-specific constraints are imposed over these computations. In the present study we investigated if the violation of a word-forming rule in Catalan (the presence of more than one…

Measurements of literacy learning in schools, the authors argue, have settled into static and individualized understandings of what should be the most invigorating and social aspect of schooling for youth. By contrast, this article explores the place of aesthetic, dialogic, and performative forms of literacy in the adolescent classroom by…