This study examines how social and motivational attributes may influence students' online learning experiences. Based on a review of social theories of learning and research about individual characteristics associated with motivation four constructs were included: social ability, learning goal orientation, perceived task value, and self-efficacy.…

This paper explores strategies to help prepare pre-service teachers from a predominantly white, relatively isolated island in Atlantic Canada to teach for diversity. The paper proposes a modified framework for "teacher identity development" that pivots around three foci for enhancing teacher awareness and commitment to action: (1)…

The disproportionate representation of minority students in special education has long been recognised as a problem in the United States. It is, however, only with the 2004 authorisation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA) that Congress has tried to prescribe a remedy for this. Beginning with a deconstruction of…

The ideas of Vygotsky [Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). "Thinking and speech." In "The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky," (Vol. 1). New York: Plenum. (Original work published 1934.)] have been increasingly influential in accounting for social-environmental influences on the development of social understanding (SU). In the first part of this article, I…

Despite the many benefits of involving undergraduates in research and the growing number of undergraduate research programs, few scholars have investigated the factors that affect faculty members' decisions to involve undergraduates in their research projects. We investigated the individual factors and institutional contexts that predict faculty…

School counselors are expected to be advocates, collaborators, consultants, and leaders in their work with students, families, administrators, school staff, and community based stakeholders (ASCA, 2005; Shoffner & Briggs, 2001; Rowley, 2000). Underlying these expectations is the belief that school counselors are knowledgeable in the areas that…

The global rise of Internet-based education is discussed in relation to models drawn from social studies and epidemiology. Experiential and data density models are highlighted, also the capacity for technological change, and phenomena observed in the spread of disease. The lesson of these illustrations is that even apparently permanent phenomena…

Drawing from a multi-year ethnography of a Latino/a immigrant Pentecostal church and from high school observations and interviews of three focal students, this article compares the language and literacy experiences of an immigrant Mexican Pentecostal adolescent in church and school contexts. I document how the youth's Sunday school class fostered…

Introduction: Activity theory, developed in the USSR as a Marxist alternative to Western psychology, has been applied widely in educational studies and increasingly in human-computer interaction research. Argument: The key elements of activity theory, Motivation, Goal, Activity, Tools, Object, Outcome, Rules, Community and Division of labour are…

Arguments about whether or not the Internet is creating new people or simply helping us to see ourselves in new ways are threaded through the literature on digital culture. People make new technology and exploit it for their own purposes and so it is reasonable to suggest that any changes in our social identities are wider in their reach than the…

Postmodernism has many inferences that can be applied to the theory and practice of higher educational administration. Today, in higher education administrators are continuously focused on strategies that will ensure the future of minority educational institutions. As a result postmodernism is an important factor in the future of higher…

Background: This article is concerned with professional learning within multi-agency settings. Since the publication of the government document "Every child matters" in 2003, professionals involved in working with children and young people have been moving into newly organized services that are required to deliver improved services for…

Prospective associations between violent victimization, the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship, and the subsequent onset of violent aggression were examined. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), participants were divided into violent and non-violent cohorts based on whether they had committed an act…

This study examines the factors influencing language and script choice in instant messaging (IM), a form of real-time computer-mediated communication, in a multilingual setting. Grounded in the New Literacy Studies, the study understands IM as a social practice involving texts, encompassing a range of literacy practices, within which a subset…

This article discusses the way in which social identities structure the learning processes of students in two subjects in the Dutch secondary school curriculum--Care and Technology. It analyses interviews with 23 students and their teachers with a view to explaining the disappointing results in these subjects in terms of breaking through gender…