The performance of school children has been studied by considering partial relationships between several personal variables such as the link between cognition and motivation. However, contextual variables, such as a child's willingness to accept social responsibility, also influence students' social and academic performance. Thus, students with greater responsibility have a better attitude towa...

Successful elementary and secondary educational reform requires analogous reform in teacher education; however, the standard undergraduate setting in schools of education poses considerable obstacles. In this paper, we describe the STEP environment for distributed problem-based learning (www.eSTEPweb.org), which represents one of many efforts to create a viable model for teacher education refor...

Almost 15 years ago, we were facing the challenge to find a name for the GMA committee working on issues that in the Anglo-American languageworld are concisely called “faculty development”. The obvious German term “Fakultätsentwicklung” would not have been very accurate as “faculty” especially in North America denotes the personnel rather than the institution (whereas the German term “Fakultät”...

Teacher education programs are experiencing reform movements in both performance based assessment and in the integration of technology into the curriculum. Performance assessment entails movement away from traditional curricula and assessment means to achieve more authentic, "real world" ways of verifying the preparedness of education graduates. Our institution’s response to these reform effort...

The use of ICTs (information and communication technologies) in Zimbabwe’s teacher education colleges is of paramount importance. The teacher trainees have a dual role to play: learning through ICTs and also learning how to teach through them. Interestingly, the rate at which schools have embraced the use of ICTs is unprecedented, but this has not been matched with an equal effort by teacher ed...

This paper shares a model for content development for teacher education in Western China. The goal of our project, Strengthening Capacity for Basic Education in Western China (SCBEWC), is to improve student learning through teacher education with a focus on student-centered instruction (SCI) and SCI's tie to multiple intelligences (MI). Both SCI and MI are consistent with the New Curriculum for...

BACKGROUND Teachers' conceptions of learning and teaching are partly unconscious. However, they are critical for the delivery of education and affect students' learning outcomes. Lasting changes in teaching behaviour can only be realized if conceptions of teachers have been changed accordingly. Previously we constructed a questionnaire named COLT to measure conceptions. In the present study, we...

Any curriculum is a construct of perceived social, political and economic needs developed at a point in time. Given that these needs are in a constant state of flux, the curriculum is subjected to periodical renewal and development processes. Gaining more visibility in the iterations of curriculum documentation is the need for Australians to be more aware of their activities impacting on the en...