This research sought to determine if a teaching intervention using tutors in a South African university could promote epistemological access to university for first-year students. Although hiring, developing and managing tutors takes money, time and energy, the effectiveness of tutors in the South African context is underreported. The first-year…

As the disciplinary focus on learner agency and autonomy increases, a space for online writing labs (OWLs) is reemerging. OWL services represent an opportunity for writing centers to expand their reach both on and off campus, assisting student writers where they are at and in a way that allows them to take increased agency over their compositional…

Written assessment--in both its senses as assessment of student writing and as written feedback on the task--is an essential part of the learning journey in foreign language learning; and at our distance-learning institution it is one of the main teaching strategies in the communication between tutors and students. In this research project, we…

Understanding how children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) improve oral language skills in relationship to tutor prompting has not yet been investigated. The study examined how variation in language prompt use by tutors during a storybook reading intervention influences growth in vocabulary and emergent literacy for young children with ASD.…

Purpose: This article examines how individual, school, and social factors shape the perceptions of students in Senior Secondary Three (SS3; in some schools called Form Six [F6]) toward English private tutoring in Macao. Design/Approach/Methods: This is a comparative study of two F6 classes of an English-medium secondary school and four SS3 classes…

The purpose of this study was to explore the operations of a sample of university-based reading clinics in order to better understand their functions and practices and to inform the planning for the authors' own clinic. This study was carried out in two phases. In Phase I, the authors conducted Internet searches and contacted knowledgeable…

This paper discusses how mature Access to Higher Education (AHE) students worked hard to gain access to Higher Education (HE) because they wished to pursue careers that required this level of education. They wanted to transform themselves as learners to achieve their aspirations despite the hurdles that many faced, such as maintaining families,…

Peer Physical Examination (PPE) is an educational tool used globally for learning early clinical skills and anatomy. In quantitative research, there are differences in students' preferences and actual participation in PPE by gender. This novel study qualitatively explores the effect that gender has on medical students' experiences of learning…

While feedback in education is important, formative feedback that leads to improvement in students' learning outcomes and emotional disposition is vital. This argument has been made repeatedly in the Western literature, both by researchers and by students participating in their research in higher education. This paper presents both affective and…

This paper describes how Applied Linguistics (AL) seminar students that are proficient in languages other than English intern as classroom assistants (CAs) in foreign language classrooms. The CAs gain useful insights from the seminar on theoretical and pedagogical approaches, methods and techniques in L2 pedagogy and then apply this knowledge…

This work reports on the results of research on modalities of mentoring in the area of social sciences at two Mexican universities and their relationship with the academic trajectories of their students. The analysis focuses on the need to identify influences of different mentoring forms on students' academic performance. The theoretical…

Over recent years the higher education sector has been encouraged to find different, effective and flexible ways of teaching. This enthusiasm is apparent more than ever before, as the current British Conservative government has produced a white paper on the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF). The TEF intends to measure and improve the quality of…

This paper follows undergraduate students' engagement with the concept of childhood presented to them during a year-long childhood and youth studies module. Through the application of "threshold concepts" as concepts which transform students' understandings of a subject, the challenges of learning new ideas or concepts of childhood are…

Information and promotional marketing play central but complex roles in market-based educational programs. This in-depth qualitative study examines these complexities using the case of Supplemental Educational Services, a parental choice program providing federally funded tutoring to low-income students in K-12 public schools. Examining the…

Although most writing centres maintain policies against providing grammar correction during writing tutorials, it is undeniable that students expect some level of grammar intervention there. Just how much students expect and receive is a matter of speculation. This article examines the grammar-correction issue by reporting on a survey of L1, L2,…