BACKGROUND: HealthWise South Africa: Life Skills for Adolescents (HW) is an evidence-based substance use and sexual risk prevention program that emphasizes the positive use of leisure time. Since 2000, this program has evolved from pilot testing through an efficacy trial involving over 7,000 youth in the Cape Town area. Beginning in 2011, through 2015, we are undertaking a new study that expand...

A socio-cultural theory of learning places importance on the social and cultural context of the learning as well as the interaction between a more expert other and the learner. Scaffolding at the level of interaction may be defined as micro-scaffolding, and support which can be found in the context of the learning can be referred to as macroscaffolding. This paper reports on research carried ou...

Mentoring has been the focus of much attention in the recent literature on initial teacher education and induction and as such has become a ‘foundation stone’ of collaborative endeavours between universities and schools in the facilitation of teacher development. In 1998 some 220 beginning teachers and 245 supervisors and mentors in New South Wales government schools were surveyed and beginning...

Recent formal models of pedagogy (Shafto & Goodman, 2008) assume that teachers provide evidence likely to increase the learner’s belief in a target hypothesis. Thus in pedagogical contexts, the learner can infer that evidence is not merely true of the concept but representative of it. If for instance, a teacher demonstrates a single function of a toy, the learner should assume that only that fu...

This study examined teacher}student discourse from a sociocultural perspective in order to ascertain the nature of e!ective instruction for school-age students with learning disabilities. This discussion examines one teacher's resource room instruction that was part of a larger study of teacher}student discourse. The results suggested two considerations: (1) the importance of teacher self-re#ec...

The Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) must deal both with strategy and knowledge in order to help students in the teaching/learning process. The knowledge in generally passed on to the students via teaching/learning activities, which may be generated by an Authoring Tool instead of being embedded in the tutor project. This way, the tutoring system can be both simpler and more flexible, provid...

This study investigated the construct validity of measures of teacher-student support in a sample of 709 ethnically diverse 2nd- and 3rd-grade academically at-risk students. Confirmatory factor analysis investigated the convergent and discriminant validities of teacher, child, and peer reports of teacher-student support and child conduct problems. Results supported the convergent and discrimina...

Gifted education is not provided in many rural schools. Some teacher educators believe that one of the reasons for this is that gifted teachers and gifted teacher training programs are oriented to provide education applicable only to urban and suburban settings. This paper presents the results of a survey of representatives of teacher training institutions offering gifted education programs. Th...

BillingsMentor is an automated Web-based service for the Billings Method of natural family planning in which the guidance and interpretation previously communicated from teacher to student is provided by programmed algorithms. There are two functions: (1) to instruct the client to generate proper descriptions of her fertility symptoms; and (2) to interpret the symptoms efficiently according to ...

The aim of this article is twofold. First, the final results of two research projects, which investigated the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on primary schools teachers in disadvantaged areas in Brazil (BET k-12) and South Africa (MELISSA), are presented and discussed. Second, the Self-Efficacy construct is proposed as a tool to measure how teachers’ perception of bein...