The educational significance of eliciting students' implicit theories of intelligence is well established with the majority of this work focussing on theories regarding entity and incremental beliefs. However, a second paradigm exists in the prototypical nature of intelligence for which to view implicit theories. This study purports to instigate an investigation into students' beliefs concerning intellectual behaviours through the lens of prototypical definitions within STEM education. To achieve this, the methodology designed by Sternberg et al. (J Pers Soc Psychol 41(1):37-55, 1981) was adopted with surveys being administered to students of technology education requiring participants to describe characteristics of intelligent behaviour. A factor analytic approach including exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modelling was taken in analysing the data to determine the underlying constructs which the participants viewed as critical in their definition of intelligence. The findings of this study illustrate that students of technology education perceive intelligence to be multifaceted, comprising of three factors including social, general and technological competences. Implications for educational practice are discussed relative to these findings. While initially this study focuses on the domain of technology education, a mandate for further work in other disciplines is discussed.

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This chapter will attempt to frame the potential of a flexible approach to teaching and learning that provides diagnostic and formative evidence to enhance traditional practice in K-12 education. Commencing with a brief account of the Community of Inquiry model (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2000) as a potential framework for online and blended learning, this chapter investigates what is it about traditional classroom practice that researchers wish to enhance, the challenges facing contemporary systems of online and blended learning, and how new ubiquitous configurations for teaching and learning have become possible. With an emphasis on supporting discourse through the development of social and cognitive behavior, this chapter will endeavor to qualify the processes that evidence psychological development in a ubiquitous learning environment and provide data to inform the relative efficacy of utilizing such processes in the design of a new pedagogical approach.

This prologue surveys the institutional landscape of education in Ancien Régime France. It describes the array of formal and informal institutions offering education in pre-revolutionary France, including the petites écoles, collèges, universities, and academies. It also lays out the curricular traditions within which many of those institutions worked and highlights the relationship among the institutions, helping us to better understand why the expulsion of the Jesuits from their collèges in 1762 set off a national crisis.