By conducting in-depth interviews with new teachers who are about to become full-time teachers and then reinterviewing them two years later, the author of this article presents how beginning teachers think and feel about teaching and describes the challenges they face as beginning teachers in the context of Hong Kong. The stories of the teachers,…

This paper examines teacher confidence in teaching music within the context of the introduction of a Foundation Phase "curriculum" in Wales for pupils aged 3-7 years. This involved a move away from music as a single subject to being part of creative development. The findings are based on a small-scale study of 12 teachers from four…

College faculty teaching in the health professions work within a unionized, neoliberal system designed to produce competent graduates trained to work in the health care hierarchy. The workers trained include community care assistants, two levels of nurses (practical nurses and baccalaureate nurses, the latter in collaboration with university…

Policy statements of the last two decades have directed schools to enter into partnerships with parents to enhance the social, emotional, and academic growth of their children. However, in practice and scholarship, parental involvement has been constructed as attendance to school-based activities and needs. This article draws on data from an…

Theory suggests that effective teachers should possess a vision for teaching, but the reality of teaching within the current educational policy climate raises questions about teachers' autonomy of their instructional decisions and ultimately their personal convictions for teaching. This exploratory study examines 11 teachers' visions of…

This article explores instances of humor in literature as it relates to children with disabilities and offers ways to help children and adolescents build an authentic understanding of disability and disability humor. The prevalent message in the books reviewed is that children with disability not only appreciate humor but also can produce various…

This article explores the ways in which English prep schools were staffed and marketed in the years before the First World War. Its aim more specifically is to employ a biographical approach to consider the emphasis that the schools placed upon sport, and in particular the extent to which they recruited Oxford and Cambridge Blues as teachers…

This study explores the appropriateness of the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT) as an instrument of assessing English-language arts (ELA) teacher candidates' effectiveness in a rural border community. Eight -candidates participated in the study. The findings call into question the adequacy of PACT to assess the…

Temporal and causal information in text are crucial in helping the reader form a coherent representation of a narrative. Deaf novice readers are generally poor at processing linguistic markers of causal/temporal information (i.e., connectives), but what is unclear is whether this is indicative of a more general deficit in reasoning about…

During narrative comprehension, reading times increase for changes in time, space, characters, goals, and causation. This study examined the extent to which instructional manipulations modify dimension monitoring during reading and whether this affects comprehension. Sixty-seven participants read three narratives (pretest). Half of the…

In this study, we collected and analyzed data to examine the extent to which the achievement gap between urban and suburban children extended to their knowledge of digital literacies. Findings indicated that the suburban children outperformed the urban students in each of the performance areas, and that suburban children reported greater…

Research on individual differences in second language (L2) reading ability has primarily focused on factors known to contribute to first language (L1) reading ability, with little consideration of factors mediating interference between languages. In an exploratory analysis, we compared the degree to which the linguistic interference that readers…

The paper discusses sequential language acquisition of the researcher's daughter Safa who transformed from a monolingual Bengali speaker to an almost monolingual English speaker in a few months after moving to the UK. Safa was born in Bangladesh and was a monolingual Bengali speaker until she was three years and nine months when the family…

This study presents a new approach for transforming the latent representation derived from a Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) space into one where dimensions have nonlatent meanings. These meanings are based on lexical descriptors, which are selected by the LSA user. The authors present three analyses that provide examples of the utility of this…

Increasing postsecondary access depends in large part on enhancing underrepresented students' writing ability, or college writing readiness. However, what exactly constitutes college-level writing is not clear-cut, complicating efforts to improve secondary preparation. This article examines recent efforts to define postsecondary writing,…