The present study describes the effect of concept maps on learners’ achievement and interest for classroom teaching of the second law of thermodynamics to engineering students. Learners are encouraged to develop their individual concept maps of the second law of thermodynamics. The scores of the learners’ concept maps are compared with the score of the expert map developed by the teacher. After...

There have been few efforts to investigate the concept of quality from learners’ perspectives or to incorporate their needs and perceptions in quality standards in distance education. This is rather surprising, particularly in distance education contexts where the quality of the learning is not derived only from the products and services delivered to the learner but also from the knowledge, und...

This study examines gendered characteristics in four female Japanese language learners’ discourse practices in a communicative setting, where they interact with native Japanese speaking friends in a JFL context. Focusing on the relationship between gender ideologies and discourse practices, I explore the extent to which learners are aware of gender ideologies in the Japanese community and how t...

This descriptive study looked into Persian learners’ autonomy and its ties with in-class group dynamics. The participants were undergraduate learners and M.A. students together with their teachers. Data were collected, using a questionnaire, on the participants’ beliefs about autonomy, their autonomous behaviors, and their perceptions of group norms and group cohesiveness. Corresponding teacher...

Digital games like Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and Oregon Trail have been used to support learning since the 1980s. However, the last decade has seen games, simulations and virtual world use take firm hold of the academic imagination. There also has been a rapid expansion of sponsored, formal research, informal inquiry, and a growing body of theory supporting the use of learning game...

After the so called “dot com crash” of the Internet in the early 2000s, tertiary level student enrolments in IT related subjects began to experience a significant decline both in international countries and South Africa. The paper replicates research done in the Western Cape, South Africa, by Seymour et al. (2005) [20], in which grade 12 learner inclinations to study Computer Science (CS) and I...

Complete involvement of learners in their learning environment has the potential to promote better absorption of knowledge, through pedagogic mechanisms such as experiential learning. To support such approaches within the domain of cultural heritage, this article discusses the deployment of tactile perception as a part of an ongoing development of a multimodal learning platform to complement le...

Research on the effectiveness of concept maps on learning has long being neglecting three critical issues; i.e., the schematically structured maps, learners’ perceptions of the maps, and the various ways of presenting concept structures. When concepts are associated by logical or causal rather than by subsumption relations, variations in selecting concepts and describing their relations may pre...

According to many recent studies the effect of learning style on academic performance has been found to be significant and mismatch between teaching and learning styles causes learning failure and frustration. Thus balancing the teaching style and the students’ learning style is very important. When emphasizing the individual learning processes, web-based learning offers a good opportunity for ...

EAP plays a highly important role in countries where English is used mainly for academic purposes. However, EAP programs have been developed without conducting a systematic needs analysis from both the students’ and instructors’ perspective. The purpose of this study is to describe the perception that EAP students and instructors have of the problematic areas in EAP programs. A total of 693 EAP...