This is a brief response to some of the issues raised by Gorard and Fitz in their paper, "What counts as evidence in the school choice debate?" published in the "British Educational Research Journal" v32, n6, 2006. Gorard and Fitz claim a "basic arithmetic error" (p. 807) in giving equal weighting to all LEAs (Noden,…

In a series of publications, the author and his colleagues have obtained scores from students in higher education on different questionnaires, and they have described the relationships among these scores using the statistic known as Wilks' [lambda]. Burt (2005) has criticized that the use of this measure is inappropriate, arguing (1) that the…

Comments on the article by R. J. Hackman and R. Wageman (see record 2006-23492-007) which presented some directions for leadership research. Hackman and Wageman organized their article around their five reject-accept questions suggesting new directions. The current author discusses how each of the questions appears far too timid for real progress…

In this article, the author discusses the advantages and the disadvantages of using surprise elements in teaching mathematics. According to the author, there are three key ideas concerning the element of surprise: (1) The ethical aspects of teachers' manipulation of their students in order to construct surprise; (2) Every mathematical task…

This article begins by noting the tendency of certain academic practices to arrest thought, and attempts to circumvent that arrestation in the writer by reflecting on her adolescent response to the writings of William Wordsworth. It explores the possible implications of a youthful feeling that poetry is "true", tying this in with Wordsworth's own…

This dissertation draws on textual reader response theory and humanities-based Disability Studies theories to explores the ways in which preservice teachers participating in a course called "Issues of Diversity in Children's and Adolescent Literature" and their instructor, who is also the researcher, made sense of representations of disability in…

Dutro discusses an analysis of the disconnect between the material realities of the lives of a group of third-grade children living in poverty and the middle-class assumptions of a district-mandated unit within a literacy curriculum. The analysis arose in the context of an ethnographic study of identity and classroom literacy practices; it was…

This article describes elaboration in "literary letters" (Atwell, 1984, 1987) written by developmental reading students. Nineteen community college students received instruction in "elaborative thought patterns," or types of elaboration, to improve the quality of their responses to popular fiction. This instruction was part of…

This article investigates mental representations of literary characters and their relations with other aspects of response to literature and age, gender, and expertise. A Saga chapter and the beginning of a contemporary novel were presented to 16 participants from each of three age groups (13 years, 17 years, adults) equally divided by gender and…

Amongst academics working with postgraduate students, there has recently been increasing interest in ways of supporting advanced academic literacy (AAL). This is a concern for us at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where we teach a diverse group of postgraduate students, most of whom are subject practitioners in…

In this article, the author describes her multimodal teaching practices in her "Adolescent Literacy Methods" course at a graduate university in the United States. By doing so, she highlights content teacher's understanding and use of various multimodal texts to effectively teach adolescents inside the classroom. In lieu of this, she raises…

In his article, Steven Klees claims that certain economic policies have been a failure in general and specifically in education. He has it backwards. His characterisation of the economics profession has not been true since the 1960s. Nobel Prizes to Simon, Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz illustrate a flowering of ideas in fields of behaviourial and…

Everything old is new again. In a recent "Point of View" editorial commentary in "Educational Technology," Richard E. Clark revisits the now-famous media-effects debate with a focus on serious games. Clark argues that serious games have little to offer that improves upon traditional methods. This article responds to those claims. While Clark's…

In this review essay, Jeanne Connell examines the influence of pragmatic philosophy on the scholarly works of twentieth-century literary theorist and English educator Louise Rosenblatt through the lens of a recent collection of her essays originally published between 1936 and 1999. Rosenblatt grounded her transactional theory of literature in…

Presents some additional comments from the current authors regarding their original article Interpolation processes in object perception: Reply to Anderson (2007). As this exchange concludes, we believe that the account of interpolation and object formation proposed by Kellman and Shipley (1991), further developed in recent years (Kellman, 2003;…