Background: Facing highly competitive and changing environment, cultivating citizens with problem-solving attitudes is one critical vision of education. In brief, the importance of education is to cultivate students with practical abilities. Realizing the advantages of web-based cooperative learning (web-based CL) and creative problem solving…

Online teaching, a new phenomenon in literary studies has elicited strong emotions among scholars of children's literature, some of whom are noted for their progressive beliefs. Like most of my colleagues in the academy, I was skeptical about teaching a graduate children's literature course online initially because I thought it would not only…

Background: Schools in K-12 have generated mission statements as ways of focusing their efforts and energies in specific areas. These mission statements vary by institutional setting as a function of the stakeholders and constituent groups who facilitate their development. To date, no studies were located in which the mission statements of…

Background: Cole and Knowles (2000) suggest that making sense of experiences and understanding personal-professional connections are the essence of professional development. These researchers posit that through personal life-history exploration, teachers make known implicit theories, values, and beliefs that underpin teaching and being a teacher.…

Background: Singapore education adopted nurturing creativity and developing creativity efficacy among their students and children. This study investigated Singapore high school students' creativity efficacy based on the contemporary model of creativity (Amabile, 1983, 1996), self efficacy (Bandura, 1989, 1997) and inclusion education. Aims:…

Background: Many of the agent-based products available to education today have been largely confined to games and instructional media that are often produced commercially by non-instructional professionals. Most of them lack customizability and are difficult to integrate into individual subject curriculum. With more agent authoring tools available…

A debate that has engaged the attention of educators and scores of intellectuals is the longstanding issue of pedagogy versus andragogy. The nature of the debate, given the interdisciplinary theoretical assumptions that underpin the issue, has had a polarizing effect on these scholars; as a result, there has been the emergence of competing…

As baby boomers approach the age of retirement, they are increasingly returning to higher education to pursue degrees for encore careers. Academic planners must pay careful attention to the specific concerns of this population to help ease their transition to a university setting after decades of absence. This qualitative study investigated the…

The adult education literature on disruptive behavior of adult learners was reviewed and a survey on disruptive behavior of adult learners was conducted with adult educators. The findings are synthesized in a conceptual framework for understanding the types and causes of disruptive behavior, which fall into the categories of inattention,…

Virtual environments (VEs) are growing in popularity among educators and have unique potential for online learning. This paper describes the unique characteristics of VEs that make them an effective venue for online learning due to increased environmental presence. Unique characteristics of VEs include nature of visual stimuli, control of the…

This article examines the potential of personal storytelling as a pedagogical method. When incorporated into the educational experience, autobiographical stories serve as a primary and fruitful link between lived experience and curricular content, a connection integral to adult learning. These stories enable learners to identify congruencies and…

Building on the framework of Peters and Armstrong's (1998) three Types of Teaching/Learning, this article explores the use of dialogue to foster a collaborative and democratic learning experience. There are three conditions under which dialogue can be facilitated as a part of the collaborative learning experience: (a) intent, (b) a dialogical…

Principles for using andragogy as a framework in designing distance education for adult learners include the following: setting the psychological climate, using learning contracts and individualized course projects, and using a group charter to guide asynchronous discussions. (SK)

This document consists of the print version of the spring and fall 1988 issues of an electronic journal; each of the issues contains three conventional articles and an exploratory "forum" article. In the spring issue, the articles and authors are "Propaganda and Adult Education" by Richard J. Novak (12 references); "The Informing of Adult…