Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between school leadership practices and teacher empowerment in the Finnish policy culture. Specifically, moral leadership and distributed leadership enacted by school principals are tested in a simultaneous design as predictor to two distinct yet related aspects of teachers' sense…

The role of parents in the guiding and monitoring of child activities is critical towards the development of the child. In Ghana reforms taken, especially at the basic school level, have focused on improving school infrastructure and enrollment ignoring parents awareness to actively involve themselves both at home and in school activities which…

Business simulations are innovative instruction models for active or cooperative learning. In this paper, we look at the social constructionist roots of these education models in light of the current efforts to enhance employability skills in undergraduate and graduate studies. More specifically, we analyse the role of business simulations in…

Study group meetings (SGMs) are voluntary-attendance peer-led team-learning workshops that supplement introductory biology lectures at a selective liberal arts college. While supporting all students' engagement with lecture material, specific aims are to improve the success of underrepresented minority (URM) students and those with weaker…

Homeschooling is controversial for a variety of reasons. One concern is whether families are sufficiently equipped to serve students with disabilities. We investigate this issue by assessing parental satisfaction with the special education services that their child is receiving in various educational sectors (e.g., homeschool, traditional public,…

This article reports on an action research project that was implemented to strengthen preservice teachers' academic skills and competencies in a Bachelor of Early Childhood Education course. Strategies identified as effective included mapping assessment tasks to State and National Early Childhood Education Curriculum and Standards Frameworks and…

Two cross-national experimental studies examined the effects of PeaceMaker and Global Conflicts on knowledge acquisition and attitude change regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. PeaceMaker and Global Conflicts are role-playing computerized simulations of this conflict. 248 undergraduate students from Turkey, Israel, Palestine and the US…

Anxiety experienced in the course of learning a foreign language is specific and unique (Horwitz et al., 1986; MacIntyre & Gardner, 1989). This paper reports a study on anxiety in Chinese undergraduate non-English majors at three different proficiency levels in a three-week immersion summer camp. By way of survey, interviews, reflective…

Recent research suggests that underrepresented minority (URM) college students, and especially first-generation URMs, may lose motivation to persist if they see science careers as unable to fulfill culturally relevant career goals. In the present study, we used a mixed-methods approach to explore patterns of motivation to pursue physical and life…

Purpose: In this era of global education reform, teacher professional learning (TPL) has emerged as a key factor in efforts to create sustainable school improvement. The same holds in Mainland China where ambitious curriculum reforms have been undertaken since 2000. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of learning-centered leadership…

Undergraduate introductory biology courses are changing based on our growing understanding of how students learn and rapid scientific advancement in the biological sciences. At Iowa State University, faculty instructors are transforming a second-semester large-enrollment introductory biology course to include active learning within the lecture…

The impact of targeted professional development activities on teachers' perceptions of self-efficacy with mobile learning remains understudied. Power (2015a) used the Mobile Teacher's Sense of Efficacy Scale (mTSES) survey instrument to measure the effects of a mobile learning themed professional development course on teachers' confidence with and…

Considering the continuous increase of international students, the main goal of this study was to examine how international students' proactive behaviors, particularly information seeking behaviors, would impact key emotional outcomes including communication satisfaction with instructors and school-life satisfaction. For this investigation, we…

This study explored the intersection between service learning and general education outcomes through the self-reported perceptions of 382 college students participating in an intercultural communication course that satisfied the general education requirement at a midsized Upper Plains research university for studying cultural diversity. The data…

The aim of this study is to analyse the effects of scientific argumentation based learning process on the eighth grade students' achievement in the unit of "cell division and inheritance". It also deals with the effects of this process on their comprehension about the nature of scientific knowledge, their willingness to take part in…