It is often assumed that the advent of digital technologies requires fundamental change to the curriculum and to the teaching and learning approaches used in schools around the world to educate this generation of “digital natives” or the “net generation”. This article analyses the concepts of 21 st -century skills and critical thinking to understand how these aspects of learning might contribut...

The technological capability of digital natives is thought to have considerable implications on the way they communicate, socialize, think and learn. Some researchers have even suggested that fundamental changes to the educational system are required to cater for the needs of this new cohort of learner, although such claims have little empirical support. In this study, we adopt a structural app...

There is much talk of a change in modern youth – often referred to as digital natives or Homo Zappiens – with respect to their ability to simultaneously process multiple channels of information. In other words, kids today can multitask. Unfortunately for proponents of this position, there is much empirical documentation concerning the negative effects of attempting to simultaneously process dif...

This study used eye tracking to investigate the allocation of attention to multimodal stimuli during an incidental learning situation, as well as its impact on subsequent explicit learning. Participants were exposed to foreign language (FL) auditory words on their own, in conjunction with written native language (NL) translations, or with both written NL translations and pictures. Incidental ac...

The digital natives of today are the first generation to grow up immersed in information and communication technologies and in particular social networking sites (SNSs). There is much hype in the media about the negative effects of SNSs, at the same time there are concerted efforts to reach these digital natives through social media by politicians, advertisers, organisations, and agencies. Ther...

The purpose of this descriptive-correlational study was to examine the level of self-efficacy of Oklahoma secondary agricultural education teachers regarding their use of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) in classroom teaching. The study also sought to determine if relationships existed between teachers’ IWB self-efficacy scores, outcome expectation scores, interest scores, and selected personal...

Native Language Identification, or NLI, is the task of automatically classifying the L1 of a writer based solely on his or her essay written in another language. This problem area has seen a spike in interest in recent years as it can have an impact on educational applications tailored towards non-native speakers of a language, as well as authorship profiling. While there has been a growing bod...

his classroom description is an enactment of the research-based practices demonstrated to be most effective for all populations we have studied (Tharp et al. 2000), kindergarten through middle school. Four decades of research in the field of education and diversity have produced a clear and solid body of evidence strong enough to guide teachers, regardless of the languages, ethnicities, race, o...

As Prensky (2001) observes, "Our students have changed radically. Today's students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach" (1). Prensky sees today's students as digital natives while most of today's teachers remain digital immigrants. In particular, today's educators are acculturated to a print paradigm while students are increasingly products of a digitally-based...