The article argues that, in the teaching of religion at undergraduate level, many students approach understanding the historical or contemporary Middle East in ways that are coloured by what they think is biblical knowledge or basic Christian beliefs. This is less noticeable for students in disciplines such as history or politics. Many history or…

This paper reports on the use of a reflective technique that incorporated video-stimulated recall to encourage reflection on practice. The author videotaped a series of mathematics lessons conducted by an experienced teacher, which were then collaboratively viewed and discussed, with the aim being to bring about changes in the teacher's practice.…

This chapter identifies three common pitfalls in the use of the concept of empathy in formal social-emotional learning interventions: (1) not distinguishing between affective and cognitive empathy ("equivocation"); (2) overestimating the role of the imagination in empathizing ("Piaget's fallacy"); and (3) not accommodating the developmental and…

This study introduces the Satisfaction with Life Scale adapted for Children (SWLS-C) and presents psychometric findings regarding its validation. The SWLS-C was adapted from the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS; Diener et al. 1985), which is one of the most commonly used measures to assess satisfaction with life in adults. Three subject matter…

Recent findings (Keysar, 1994; Weingartner & Klin, 2005) have shown that readers are not always accurate at taking a story character's perspective. When readers evaluated a character's understanding of a written message, they mistakenly took into account information that was inaccessible to that character. The results from the three experiments…

This study examines the relationship between service-learning participation and global perspective-taking. A global perspective is broadly defined to include both the acquisition of knowledge, attitudes, and skills important to intercultural communication and the development of more complex epistemological processes, identities, and interpersonal…

Storytelling is an integral part of life for Indigenous Australians. Before the arrival of Europeans and continuing after; gathered around the campfire in the evening stories were and are still shared; passed from one generation to the next. In modern times, in addition to a continuing oral traditions, another method of storytelling has risen from…

This paper adopts a rhetorical perspective in order to examine language about children in the discourse of mathematics education through a study of metaphor. Previous research has tended to emphasize the notion of "beliefs", which locates responsibility for problematic conceptions of children within the heads of individuals, particularly…

In the past decade there has been a marked push for the development of employability skills to be part of the PhD process. This push is generally by stakeholders from above and outside the PhD process, i.e. government and industry, who view skills as a "summative product" of the PhD. In contrast, our study interviewed stakeholders inside…

The aim of this study was to clarify the relationships between empathy variables, personal values and moral reasoning. The impact of empathic concern, perspective taking and personal values measured by the Portrait Value Questionnaire on moral schemas measured by the Defining Issues Test was investigated among 599 students from a university of…

The ability to understand the goals and intentions behind other people's actions is central to many social interactions. Given the profound social difficulties seen in autism, we might expect goal understanding to be impaired in these individuals. Two influential theories, the "broken mirror" theory and the mentalising theory, can both predict…

In this article, the author explores the pedagogical value of cinema's capacity to offer a "decentered" mode of perspective for the audience. The author illustrates a film's ability to present a different perspective with reference to Sean Penn's "The Pledge" (2001) and Ivan Sen's "Beneath Clouds" (2002), which show how cinema allows viewers to…

While international literature asserts that research interest in the formal exclusion of students from school is increasing, studies that give voice to parents' views are few. This study explores the experiences of New Zealand families affected by exclusion. Eight individuals or couples, all of whom had had a teenager for whom they were…

When adult students write their life story, they gather selected life experiences and transform these onto the written page. In the course of this literary process they revisit sites of the past and reflect on the meaning of past events; many reconstruct these events from the point of view of the present, and most close their narrative by…

A growing interest exists in the measuring of social adaptive functioning in children with mild to borderline intellectual disabilities (MBID), but valid instruments to measure this construct are lacking. The aim of the present study was to develop such an instrument and to examine it on its discriminate validity. In 141 children aged 8-12 years a…