"Focus on Basics" is a publication of the U.S. Division of World Education, Inc. It presents best practices, current research on adult learning and literacy, and how research is used by adult basic education teachers, counselors, program administrators, and policymakers. "Focus on Basics" is dedicated to connecting research…

The White Paper "Valuing People" [Department of Health (DoH) (2001) "Valuing people: a new strategy for learning disability for the 21st century," London, HMSO] indicates that people with a learning disability need to become more actively involved in the decisions that affect their lives. This includes being offered active choices in access to…

We will argue that CALL can usefully be viewed as a subset of computer software engineering and can profit from adopting some of the recent progress in software development theory. The unified modelling language has become the industry standard modelling technique and the accompanying unified process is rapidly gaining acceptance. The manner in…

In lecture halls, in secondary school classrooms, during training workshops, and at research conferences, PowerPoint is becoming a preferred method of communicating, presenting, and sharing knowledge. Questions have been raised about the implications of the use of this new medium for knowledge dissemination. It is suggested PowerPoint supports a…

Many studies have been designed to understand effects of challenge courses and their benefits. Few studies, however, have been conducted to understand participants' perceptions of these programs. In this study, 16 adults working at a dental office attended a one-day challenge course program designed to teach lessons about communication. Data were…

Investigation of children's understanding of the earth can reveal much about the origins and development of scientific knowledge. Vosniadou and Brewer (1992) claim that children construct coherent, theory-like mental models of the earth. However, more recent research has indicated that children's knowledge of the earth is fragmented and…

This study focused on developmental word recognition strategies used by first language (L1) English readers of second language (L2) Japanese. There were two proficiency groups of Japanese learners. The study considered whether or not word recognition strategies are developmental and whether or not L1 orthographic interference (i.e., involvement of…

Reflective practice is integral for developing counsellors to maintain self-awareness and to recognize influences upon ones personal theory of counselling. In this exploratory narrative inquiry research, four doctoral level counselling psychologists participated to uncover "What are the personal stories of developing counsellors and in what…

This study examined the effect of graphic organizers on the comprehension of a health education brochure text and compared subjective with objective comprehension measures. Graphic organizers are graphical depictions of relations among concepts in a text. Participants read a brochure text about asthma with and without these organizers, and…

Sixteen married couples volunteered to participate in a 6-week empathy training program. Ten of the 16 couples observed and made comments about their taped interaction at the end of the program. Individuals watched the tape of their own interaction at the follow-up and were asked several qualitative questions, including what they noticed about…

The purpose of this action research project was to improve the social skills of eight preschool students and four first grade and second grade students through the use of Social Stories and visual supports to create a more positive learning environment. The teacher researchers wanted to increase the social skills of students who had been diagnosed…

The author describes 10 classroom activities that are designed to promote reading comprehension and organizational skills in the context of solving math problems. These lessons help students to clarify the information within math problems, identify what operations are necessary, and express their solutions more accurately and precisely. A…

This article discusses the possibility for expanding our understanding of the visual to include the "spoken visual" within oral history analysis. It suggests that adding a further reading, that of the visualized body, to the voice-centred relational method we can consider the meaning of the uniformed body for the individual. It uses as a…

The analysis of classroom observation data is seen as increasingly important in research on the impact of high-stakes language tests or new foreign-language programmes on students, teachers and other stakeholders. Video-recordings of language teaching and learning in classrooms impacted by such tests or programmes can provide revealing data,…

The purpose of this collaborative schools-university study was to investigate how the explicit instruction of literary devices during designated literacy sessions could improve the quality of children's narrative writing. A guiding question for the study was: Can children's writing can be enhanced by teachers drawing attention to the literary…