This paper addresses the nature and significance of productive engagement in cognitive activity and metacognitive regulation in collaborative learning tasks that involve complex scientific knowledge. A situative framework, combining the constructs of social regulation and content processing, provided the theoretical basis for the development of a…

Pertinent research literature recognizes the importance of using multimodalities to enhance and extend ways of learning across the curriculum in such subject areas as literacy, geology, media studies, physical education, social studies and disabilities studies. As an action researcher who constantly seeks ways to improve my own classroom practice,…

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) has called for changes in mathematics teaching from a procedural to conceptual focus since 1980, yet the way mathematics is taught in many classrooms continues to contradict the recommended practices. The pervasiveness of this challenge has led some educators to suggest changes in university…

These studies examined the role of ontological beliefs about category boundaries in early categorization. Study 1 found that preschool-age children (N = 48, aged 3-4 years old) have domain-specific beliefs about the meaning of category boundaries; children judged the boundaries of natural kind categories (animal species, human gender) as discrete…

Qualitative research has provided insight into how students experience and perceive the learning process in music. A model of learning, teaching, assessment and evaluation has been researched and reconstructed together with students. As a basic investigative approach the method of action research has been used. Two action cycles were planned and…

This work starts from a systematic review about music education and self-regulation during learning processes. Then the paper identifies those meta-cognitive strategies that music students should adopt during their instrumental practice. The goal is applying such concepts in order to rethink the structure of a didactic e-book for instrumental…

Lexical categories like noun and verb are foundational to language acquisition, but these categories do not come neatly packaged for the infant language learner. Some have proposed that infants can begin to solve this problem by tracking the frequent nonadjacent word (or morpheme) contexts of these categories. However, nonadjacent relationships…

Using data from a research project in Shanghai, China, this paper reports on an expert teacher's implicit 'Local Instruction Theories' (LIT) (Gravemeijer, 2004) that underpin his guidance of a junior teacher in lesson design and implementation. Our analysis focuses on the expert teacher's input to the junior teacher to help her understand how and…

Watching foreign language programmes and films with captions (same-language subtitles intended for the deaf and hard-of-hearing) has been shown to assist learners in phonetic retuning, vocabulary acquisition and listening comprehension [e.g. Mitterer and McQueen, 2009. Foreign subtitles help but native-language subtitles harm foreign speech…

There has been a longstanding assumption that gifted, high-ability, or high-performing students prefer working alone; however, this may not be true in every case. The current study expanded on this assumption to reveal more nuanced learning preferences of these students. Sixty-nine high-performing and community-school students in Grades 5 and 6…

This study explored the effects of explicit and implicit instructions in the development of EFL learners' speech acts of complimenting (Cs) and complimenting response (CRs). The participants in this research were 56 intermediate EFL learners from a language center, participating as members of intact classes that were divided into three groups of…

Conceptions of learning are seen as an important factor in shaping students' patterns of learning. However, conceptions are often implicit and difficult to assess. Metaphors have been proposed as a method to assess conceptions, because metaphors are closely linked to the conceptual system. Therefore, in our study we assessed which conceptions of…

Learning takes place across different social contexts, and understanding how learners perceive and traverse different learning contexts enables educators to gain a more comprehensive view of their learning processes and to support their learning better. This study examined how undergraduate foreign language learners perceived their learning…

The use of learning itineraries based on conceptual maps is studied in order to propose a more flexible instructional design that strengthens the learning process focused on the student, generating non-linear processes, characterising its elements, setting up relationships between them and shaping a general model with specifications for each…

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether or not conceptions of learning diverge in different science domains by identifying high school students' conceptions of learning in physics, chemistry and biology. The Conceptions of Learning Science (COLS) questionnaire was adapted for physics (Conceptions of Learning Physics, COLP), chemistry…