David Little

Claire Ellen Weinstein
ce.weinstein@mail.utexas.edu

Claire Ellen Weinstein is a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology and past Chair of the Doctoral Concentration in Learning, Cognition, and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the Director of the Cognitive Learning Strategies Research Project.

Her research focuses on her Model of Strategic Learning and its validity and usefulness for instructors, counselors and learning assistance specialists, and for developing educational programs and diagnostic learning assessments for schools, colleges, and business and government training settings. She is also the Principal Investigator of a longitudinal research project investigating cognitive, meta-cognitive, motivational and learning skill variables and their role in college preparedness.

Claire Ellen is a past recipient of the Outstanding Contributions Award from the International Association Of Applied Psychology. She is also a Past-President of the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association. She helped to create the Center for Psychology in Education when she was a member of the Board of Educational Affairs and she was elected to the governing council of APA.

Claire Ellen was recently selected as the Developmental Educator of the Year for the State of Texas and is a past winner of a Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas. She was inducted as a Fellow of the ACDEA in developmental education. In the summer of 2000 she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Academy of Science in Beijing, China, and has been a delegate to a number of international conferences on both theoretical and applied psychology representing the United States.

Claire Ellen has over 150 publications, including the assessment instrument called the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory (LASSI), which is used in more than 70% of the colleges and universities in the United States and has been translated into many languages. Her learning strategies course at the University of Texas at Austin has won a number of awards and is highly successful at increasing the performance and retention to graduation of at-risk students. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board has selected her course as a model for Learning Frameworks courses in the State of Texas. She has also conducted over 250 workshops on strategic learning and teaching in both high school and college settings.

Philip Benson

Philip Benson is a Professor in the English Department at the Hong Kong Institute of Education. He has published widely on the subject of autonomy, including the book Teaching and researching autonomy in language learning (Pearson, 2001) and a recent 'State-of-the-Art' paper in Language teaching (40:1). His current research interests include language learning histories (he is co-editor with David Nunan of the recent collection, Learners' stories: difference and diversity in language learning - Cambridge University Press, 2005), popular culture and language learning, and language teacher education.

Marina Mozzon-McPherson

Marina Mozzon-McPherson is an Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Hull (UK). From September 1997 to September 2001 she successfully managed project SMILE (Strategies for Managing an Independent Learning Environment). This project was funded by a Higher Education Funding Scheme for the Development of Teaching and Learning and focused on the promotion and development of good practices in the implementation of independent learning environments (classroom, online and self-access). The project highlighted the need for systematic research in the area of learning communities and advising. Amongst its outcomes are:

• an online postgraduate qualification for language advisers (http://www.hull.ac.uk/languages)
• a book on issues of advising for language learning and the emerging role of advisers: (http://www.cilt.org.uk/books/beyondlanguageteaching.htm)
• and two accredited strategy-based learning modules.

She has published extensively in the field of autonomy and advising and her work has inspired and influenced the wider academic community. Amongst the benefits reported by the students taking the online postgraduate course are: 'professional enhancement', 'a good example of how an e-learning programme should be run', 'an increased use of their self-access facilities', 'personal changes in attitudes towards teaching', and 'instigation of changes in institutional policies on integration and support of independent learning'. Her current research work is on communities of practice and learning communities.

Cynthia White