When the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) began working with Boston Public Schools (BPS) in 2005, the most pressing need articulated by the district was research and development in the area of middle school literacy. Thus SERP researchers undertook to specify more precisely what the middle school literacy problem in BPS was by…

This article provides some of the key findings of a comparative study commissioned by the International Labour Organization (ILO), which attempted to understand more about the impact and implementation of national qualifications frameworks (NQFs). Sixteen case studies were produced, on qualifications frameworks in Australia; Bangladesh; Botswana;…

This article contributes to an emerging body of literature on the impact of high stakes testing accountability policies on implementation and teaching practice. It uses a theory of implementation, sense-making, to highlight the process by which policy and context shape teacher decision making. We focus on teachers in bilingual classrooms in an…

Earlier essays in this symposium describe Restorative Justice processes in schools, referred to in our school as a Fairness Committee. Implementing these collaborative, restorative processes does not come without challenges. This essay will explore some of the historical and theoretical roots of the Fairness Committee in Lawrence Kohlberg's work…

This article discusses obstacles that higher education institutions may need to surmount when introducing quality assurance measures such as student evaluation of teaching. It is based on a research study of how student evaluation of one-to-one instrumental tuition is perceived, experienced and practiced by instrumental teachers and their students…

Special school provision for children and young people with special educational needs is an anomaly that exists in many inclusive education systems; this type of educational provision has proved to be resilient even though, with reference to children and young people with special educational needs, there is almost universal acceptance of the…

This article is an analysis of official UNESCO documents--General Conference resolutions and Executive Board decisions for the period 1946 to 1999--that address international education. It shows that international education has been key to UNESCO's mission since the organization began, and illustrates various trends in its acceptance and…

General education reform provides strategic opportunities for departments. This article analyzes reform at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, illustrating how departments could use the reform process to clarify their strategic planning, align with institutional goals, and steer the university closer to departmental objectives. (Contains 1 table.)

Competency education, an educator-led reform, is taking root in schools and districts across the country. In some states, state leadership has cleared the path with policies to advance competency education. This paper seeks to map out the terrain of the district implementation strategies being used to convert traditional systems into personalized,…

In a 2012 paper for the Center for American Progress, "The State of Evaluation Reform," Patrick McGuinn (Drew University) identified the opportunities and challenges facing education agencies in Race to the Top (RTTT) grant-winning states as they prepared for the implementation of new teacher evaluation systems. The 2012 study undertook…

This study describes the design, implementation, and analysis of three related surveys launched to investigate E-Learning in undergraduate humanities classes at a public technological research university. Examined are the independent variables of learning style, general expectation, and interaction. The surveys were administered in the summer of…

In India, 57% of men between 15 and 54 years and 10.8% of women between 15 and 49 years use tobacco. A wide variety of tobacco gets used and the poor and the underprivileged are the dominant victims of tobacco and its adverse consequences. Project MYTRI (Mobilizing Youth for Tobacco-Related Initiatives in India) was a tobacco prevention…

Recognizing an urgent need for increased access to evidenced-based psychological treatments, public health authorities have recently allocated over $2 billion to better disseminate these interventions. In response, implementation of these programs has begun, some of it on a very large scale, with substantial implications for the science and…

Performance funding--the linking of allocation of resources to accomplishment of certain desired outcomes--is an idea that is once again finding favor with policymakers. It has intuitive appeal; what's not to like about paying for results? While it is a notion that makes common sense to most decisionmakers, it is an idea with a very checkered…

Inquiry-guided learning (IGL) has widespread appeal in higher education as a suite of teaching strategies that promotes learning through students' increasingly independent investigation of questions, problems, and issues using the methods of inquiry of the disciplines. Framed as especially appropriate for research universities, IGL has been…