Information is presented in this publication about the outcomes for students who completed their vocational education and training (VET) under the Productivity Places Program (PPP) during 2008. The Productivity Places Program Survey covers students who were awarded a qualification in 2008 with funding from the PPP. The survey focuses on students'…

Storytelling was first developed as a means of transferring important historical information from one generation to another. Though stories are told today more often for entertainment and amusement, the art of storytelling remains of significant value to society. Whether the children are telling the story or simply listening to it, the benefits of…

From a review of instructional design theories, research, and practice, the author has derived his "First Principles of Instruction". In this article, he suggests a rubric for using these principles to evaluate existing instruction. The article presents a Course Evaluation form and accompanying demonstration and application rubrics that enable the…

As the range of experiences offered by conservatoires expands to serve an increasingly diverse student cohort, it is no longer reasonable to assume that all students will fit neatly into the traditional expectations of institutions. In the 3P model of learning, the prior learning of students is one of the presage factors that interact with process…

How the brain learns to read has been the subject of much neuroscience educational research. Evidence is mounting for identifiable networks of connected neurons that are particularly active during reading processes such as response to visual and auditory stimuli, relating new information to prior knowledge, long-term memory storage, comprehension,…

This paper examines one important dimension of inclusive education: the development of in-service teacher education courses. Using an example from Cyprus, it discusses the issue of contextualizing teacher training courses to suit teachers' prior knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about inclusion. The paper considers some of the findings of a survey…

Background/Context: How do we account for the persistence of below-average math test score performance among California Hispanics who are fluent in English, as well as Spanish-dominant English learners? Recent studies have attributed the problem to an overly rigid focus on "what works" in curriculum and fluency in English to the…

In this descriptive, mixed methods study, the researcher investigated the influence of teacher preparation programs' field experiences on teacher candidates' sense of teaching efficacy. Tschannen-Morgan & Woolfolk-Hoy's (2001) Teacher Sense of Efficacy Scale questionnaire was sent to 221 teacher candidates enrolled in one of…

This study developed an educational online game, Super Delivery, targeting knowledge about saving electricity, and conducted case studies of eight sixth-grade students using this game to explore the factors influencing the effectiveness of students' knowledge acquisition in digital game-based learning (DGBL). This study followed Miles and…

In this study the authors investigate whether a whole-class educational blog could facilitate culturally relevant instruction and authentic intellectual work in U.S. history. Qualitative data were collected and analyzed that included student comments posted to an educational blog, classroom observations, and follow-up interviews. Based on the…

This narrative inquiry aims to better understand and document how a bilingual Latina preservice elementary teacher's experiences as an immigrant student and English learner (EL) inform the construction of her professional identity and practice as an English language arts (ELA) educator. Although the study participant voices a lack of confidence,…

Designers of technology-based instruction wrestle with the possibility that their product will seem cold or mechanical to the user. Given the current understanding of learning as a social process, it is no longer reasonable to restrict the learner's participation in the process of instruction to trivial interactions. We believe that designs will…

Recent findings show that preschool children are selective with respect to whom they ask for information and whose claims they endorse. In particular, they monitor an informant's record of past accuracy or inaccuracy and use that record to gauge future trustworthiness. We ask if preschoolers also monitor the non-verbal cues of assent or dissent…

In this article, the authors describe a two-phase inquiry lesson in which students explore the catalytic activity of amylase on starch (Rungruangsa and Panijpan 1979). In the first phase, students' prior knowledge about the reaction is assessed through a set of directed prompts and small-group discussion, then challenged or reinforced as students…

In this article, we suggest that self-reflection and self-control--studied under the rubric of "executive function" (EF)--have the potential to transform the way in which learning occurs, allowing for the relatively rapid emergence of new behaviors. We describe 2 lines of research that indicate that reflecting on a task and its affordances helps…