Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) seeks mutually comprehensible social interaction in spoken discourse. To serve this purpose, coursebooks undoubtedly play a key role as to how speaking practice takes place. In Turkey, local coursebooks are prescribed by the Ministry of National Education (MoNE); however, many practitioners seem to opt for the…

This article examines gender gaps in academic performance (grades in mathematics and reading) between boys and girls of ninth-grade elementary schools in the Czech Republic. Our analysis is based on 2003 data from the Programme for International Student Assessment, encompassing the academic performance and family background of ninth-grade pupils.…

The 2011 edition of the "Digest of Education Statistics" is the 47th in a series of publications initiated in 1962. The "Digest" has been issued annually except for combined editions for the years 1977-78, 1983-84, and 1985-86. Its primary purpose is to provide a compilation of statistical information covering the broad field…

This article gives a description of three analyses concerning the construct learning to learn and the assessment of cross-curricular skills. First, the correspondence between learning to learn and cross-curricular skills is examined by means of a theoretical content analysis. Second, the nature of cross-curricular skills is studied through a…

Computer-supported collaborative inquiry learning (CSCiL) has been proposed as a successful learning method to foster scientific literacy. This research aims to bridge the knowledge gap surrounding the role of peers as scaffolding sources in CSCiL environments. The primary objective is to explicitly implement peer assessment as a scaffolding tool…

Learners in general struggle when working with word problems. South African learners in particular have an added barrier owing to the many official languages that have been legislated. The South African Department of Basic Education, through its curriculum statements, envisages that problem solving will play a fundamental part in mathematics…

This paper presents the results of a study on students' appreciation of information and communication technology (ICT) applications in schools for general secondary education. We investigate to what extent students from different gender and ethnic backgrounds appreciate various characteristics of ICT tools. The research question is, "How are…

The primary purpose was to investigate the efficacy of a full year of single-sex (SS) teaching of science. The secondary aims were to locate any differentiation by set and gender, and to relate these to more proximal variables. Participants were 13 year olds. Higher set girls gave evidence of clear benefits overall, and higher set boys also,…

Secondary school chemical education has a problem: namely, the seeming irrelevance to the pupils of chemistry. Chemical education prepares pupils for participation in society. Therefore, it must imply a model of society, of chemistry, and of the relation between them. In this article it is hypothesized that logical positivism currently offers this…

Negative peer attitudes are generally recognised as being a major barrier to full social inclusion at school for children and youth with disabilities. The present study examined the attitudes of 1,872 grade nine high school students in Ontario, Canada toward their peers with disabilities. A bioecological perspective and a structural equation…