We investigated whether children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) have a deficit in recognising familiar faces. Children with ASD were given a forced choice familiar face recognition task with three conditions: full faces, inner face parts and outer face parts. Control groups were children with developmental delay (DD) and typically…

Four experiments examined children's inferences about the relation between objects' internal parts and their causal properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds recognized that objects with different internal parts had different causal properties, and those causal properties transferred if the internal part moved to another object. In Experiment 2,…

Knowledge of familiar people is essential to guide social interaction, yet there is uncertainty about whether semantic knowledge for people is stored in a categorical structure as for objects. Four priming experiments using hard-to-perceive primes investigated whether occupation forms a category connecting famous persons in semantic memory. Primes…

Research on pre-service teachers' perspectives toward inclusion in the Egyptian context is almost non-existent. Given this dearth of research, the purpose of this study was to examine pre-service teachers' attitudes toward including students with special needs in general education classrooms in Egypt. More specifically, this study examined the…

There is growing recognition of the importance of helping children to develop an ability to think about biological and environmental issues in terms of systems interactions and impacts. Several progressions have been published that suggest how their conceptual understandings may develop over time. However these are not necessarily as informative…

The main objective of this study was to gain knowledge as to how social passivity in school is related to the grades pupils achieve. The relation between social passivity and school grades received in eight different subjects, varying according to familiarity to teachers, demands of cooperation with peers and demands for public display of learning…

Favoritism is among the most popular topics in educational institutions. Teachers are said to favor certain students over others at school and especially in their classes. Despite this popularity, there are very few studies on this topic. In Turkey, discussion of the topic does not go beyond newspaper articles. This study was therefore undertaken…

Technological advances have revolutionised methods of both teaching and testing in languages, and practitioners have eagerly embraced the opportunity to provide more innovative ways of doing this. The unique features offered by technology make it increasingly possible to test for a wide range of language skills required for a specific purpose.…

This study examined the internal consistency and validity of a new rating scale to identify gifted students, the Gifted Rating Scales-School Form (GRS-S). The study explored the effect of gender, race/ethnicity, age, and rater familiarity on GRS-S ratings. One hundred twenty-two students in first to eighth grade from elementary and middle schools…

The author conducted research in Jordan, where he interviewed secondary school social studies teachers about their perspectives on teaching critical-thinking skills in their classrooms. All interviews were audiotaped or videotaped in Arabic and later translated into English. The author qualitatively analyzed data, including the translations of the…

The interaction between learner characteristics, including learners' histories and goals of learning, and learners' analysis and production of target genres remains a topic of continuing interest in the genre-based literacy framework. This case study documented an L2 graduate student's individualized engagement with genre in both her reading and…

In this study we investigated popularity and perceived non-cooperativeness in multiethnic elementary schools. A sample of 94 pupils aged 10-12 years, from five multiethnic elementary schools, were divided into 26 teams and participated in a structured cooperative learning (SCL) curriculum of 11 lessons. Neither teachers nor pupils had prior SCL…

The Bolman and Deal (2003) Four-Frame Model was adapted in this qualitative phenomenological research study to describe how stakeholders experience student service-learning. The study presents how students perceive the positive benefits and critical challenges encountered in their service-learning experience; how professors perceive the positive…

Australia's national educational goals place considerable importance on the place of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education. The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians of December 2008 asserted that "in this digital age young people need to be highly skilled in the use of ICT" (MCEETYA,…

Background/Context: There is an extensive body of research on school and student characteristics associated with teacher career decisions that has contributed greatly to our knowledge of teacher preferences. Yet this research also has a number of limitations, including a lack of attention to the sociocultural influences on teacher careers and the…