Background: Data-based decision-making in education often focuses on the use of summative assessment data in order to bring about improvements in student achievement. However, many other sources of evidence are available across a wide range of indicators. There is potential for school leaders, teachers and students to use these diverse sources…

Background: Approaches to conducting research with children afford them varying degrees of participatory power. Despite children's varying roles within research, more needs to be understood about the influences of unintentional power plays and, in particular, interactions between participant and non-participants on children's participation in…

Background: Efficient classroom management and adequate discipline are major issues for teachers in schools worldwide, with the guiding of students' behaviour as one of the primary challenges. Teachers' knowledge, skills, attitudes and behaviour play central roles in the appropriate handling of classroom disturbances. Purpose: The purpose of this…

Background: Preschool teacher's instructional practices are one component of high-quality early education classrooms that have the potential to directly influence young children's school readiness and success; therefore, the type and quality of instructional practices used by preschool teachers should be explored. Purpose: The purpose of this…

Background: Within the realm of public education, there is a well-known "knowledge to practice gap" on current conceptions of classroom assessment. A collaborative research project undertaken by the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO) and a research team at Queen's University explored the roots of this gap from the…

Background: The UK, like most countries across Europe and other advanced economies, has experienced an alarming rise in the levels of young people (aged between 16 and 24 years) who are detached from both the labour market and the education and training system. In the UK, there are nearly a million 16-24-year-olds who are recorded as being not in…

Analysis of teachers' questions, part of the ORACLE (Observation Research and Classroom Learning Evaluation) project research, is examined in detail. Scarth and Hammersley argue that the rules ORACLE uses for identifying different types of questions involve levels of ambiguity and inference that threaten reliability and validity of the study's…

Based on a survey of 969 university entrants from 163 comprehensive schools in England and Wales, this article examines the effect of the 'open' sixth form upon the educational background of university students. (Author)

The author reviews the major classifications of social class, assesses their validity, surveys the use made of them in research literature, suggests how they should be interpreted, and assesses to what degree findings couched in these terms correspond to the reality of social differences in Britain. (Author)

Background: Before the 1990s, an individual or medical model dominated educational research methodology with respect to younger children: the subjects of the research were usually considered untrustworthy sources of information. A subsequent shift towards an ecological model has focused on the child's perspective: however, Lewis and Lindsay have…

The intent here was to collect data relevant to evaluating the post-primary educational system as a whole. This includes assessing what the goals of post-primary education should be, obtaining teachers' and pupils' subjective assessments of whether these goals were being attained, and asking why the goals were not being better attained. (Author/RK)