Mudejars helping other Mudejars in the kingdom of Valencia

By the late thirteenth century the balance of power that had been established in the 1250s in the kingdom of Valencia between Christians and Muslims had been deeply altered. Christian demographic pressure resulted in increased encroachment of Mudejar privileges. At a time when their military leadership had left the kingdom, the Mudejars were forced to create a different apparatus to resist Christian abuse, especially from local officials. Thus, the Mudejars created an internal network of support that through legal and illegal channels, both at the individual and communal level, helped other Mudejars who were fleeing from the law.     

The effects of morphological and syntactic knowledge on reading comprehension in spanish speaking children

Reading and Writing - Reading comprehension is a complex task requiring many underlying skills. Syntactic awareness and morphological awareness are two such skills that have been shown to be...     

Role of technology in the design of learning environments

Learning Environments Research - The design of learning environments is being increasingly investigated, largely as a result of higher-education providers being challenged by both societal and...     

Continental Drift: A Discussion Strategy for Secondary School

The paper describes a discussion strategy for secondary schoolstudents. The strategy focus the various dimensions of Science, especially the internal sociological and philosophicaldimensions. Students are expected to learn more about Science, namely the role of controversy for scientific progress.The article contains key questions for the students and guidelines for the teacher and also an analysis of the strategyin terms of the construction of Science and of learning processes.     

A Teaching-Learning Sequence of Colour Informed by History and Philosophy of Science

In this work, we present a teaching-learning sequence on colour intended to a pre-service elementary teacher programme informed by History and Philosophy of Science. Working in a socio-constructivist framework, we made an excursion on the history of colour. Our excursion through history of colour, as well as the reported misconception on colour helps us to inform the constructions of the teaching-learning sequence. We apply a questionnaire both before and after each of the two cycles of action-research in order to assess students’ knowledge evolution on colour and to evaluate our teaching-learning sequence. Finally, we present a discussion on the persistence of deep-rooted alternative conceptions.     

Learning Through Reflection in Mathematics Teacher Education

This article is written from our perspective as both researchers and mathematics teacher educators, and describes how our knowledge has grown as we engage concurrently in both teaching and research. Reflection-on-action is a means for us of approaching the relationship between theory and practice that comes out of the development of our work as researchers and mathematics teacher educators. The article presents the different steps we have identified in the relationship between theory and practice during our professional development. In the discussion, we examine the whole sequence of steps showing what we have learnt. Afterwards, we use the sequence of activity of the reflective process as a framework in which we can operate and reflect about our own development.     

The Role of Age and Occupational Future Time Perspective in Workers’ Motivation to Learn

The purpose of this paper is to better understand the relationship between employees’ chronological age and their motivation to learn, by adopting a lifespan perspective. Based on socioemotional selectivity theory, we suggest that occupational future time perspective mediates the relationship between age and motivation to learn. In accordance with expectancy-value and self-efficacy theories, motivation to learn was operationalized as employees’ learning motivational beliefs (i.e., learning self-efficacy and learning value). To test our model, survey data were obtained from 560 workers between the ages of 21 to 64 years. Results demonstrated the importance of taking workers’ occupational future time perspective into account to explain relationships between age and learning motivational beliefs.     

Completely illiterate adults can learn to decode in 3 months

The purpose of this case series was to explore whether adults who did not have the opportunity to acquire reading skills during childhood are able to do so rapidly if trained with an adequate literacy program. After 14 weeks of training with a new, optimized, literacy course based on cognitive research, six out of eight participants became able to read words they had never encountered, hence demonstrating that they were definitely engaged in decoding processes that allow autonomous reading. Moreover, they showed enhanced phonemic sensitivity and phonological memory. The latter finding implies that functional changes can take place rapidly outside the reading domain even when reading is acquired in adulthood. Thus, there is no major plasticity impediment preventing rapid eradication of illiteracy in adults.     

Beyond transition: a comparison of the employment experiences of American and Canadian adults with LD

With the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States and the Canadian Chartre of Rights and Freedoms, there is a new work environment for individuals with learning disabilities (LD) in North America. This qualitative study sought to compare the employment experiences of 25 U.S. adults with LD and 24 Canadian adults with LD. Areas of comparison were job getting, experiences on the job, and job advancement. Remarkably, the U.S. and Canadian adults with LD had nearly the same employment experiences. In essence, each set of data mirrored the other despite marked differences in U.S. and Canadian federal disability legislation.