The "National Mathematics Curriculum Framing Paper" has been released for consultation until 28 February 2009 (see www.ncb.org.au). Professional associations, teachers, teacher educators and others are taking the opportunity to organise meetings and forums to consider the views presented in the paper and to provide critical feedback and…

In this article, I report a qualitative study that sheds light on how adult learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) are constructing new national identities in the context of the challenges associated with immigration. In particular, I trace how the common threads among their conceptions of citizenship compare with those embedded within…

Worldwide, science education reform movements are stressing the need to promote "scientific literacy" among young people. Increasingly, this is taken to include empowering students to engage critically with science-related news reporting. Despite this requirement now featuring in statutory curricula throughout the UK, there has, to date,…

Creating new distance e-learning modules requires considerable staff expertise. To help develop and expand this, mentoring holds promise. However, in lifelong learning provision, potential module creators are often very distant from potential mentors and asynchronously available. E-mentoring might overcome these logistical constraints. This study…

Previous research in the area of resistance has inadequately described opposition to change within-school reform initiatives with a social justice orientation. A lack of attention to, and agreement on, the nature and causes of resistance may explain why so many equity-minded educational reforms fail to be sustained. This article highlights various…

This study investigates through structured questionnaires how teacher educators perceive current teacher education practices in Israel and at their colleges. An open-ended question provides their metaphorical viewpoint. The findings indicate that teacher educators believe teacher education in the country is at a high level. They perceive teacher…

This article presents a comprehensive evaluation of the impact of two community projects on energy efficiency held in Malaysia in January 2008. Specifically, the study was undertaken to compare levels of attitudes and practices of energy efficiency between baseline and post-campaign survey; compare electricity consumptions before, one month after,…

The purpose of the study is to identify the patterns of change in higher education institutions. It examines the contexts of the changing quality assurance mechanisms used by the different types of higher education institutions in England, Japan, and New York State between 2001 and 2007. The paper argues that there were no clear patterns of…

The relation between educational research and practice is a growing point of interest and has produced numerous lively debates. Although many reports and position papers have been published on this topic, little empirical data are available. The aim of this study is to explore the gap between educational research and practice and to assess the…

There are many reasons why interface design for interactive courseware fails to support quality of learning experiences. The causes such as the level of interactivity, the availability of the interfaces to interact with the end users and a lack of deep knowledge about the role of interface design by the designers in the development process are…

Reported here is one part of the nationally representative, "Schools and Continuing Professional Development in England--State of the Nation" research study which was funded by the Training and Development Agency for Schools (TDA). This paper sets out to understand how teachers and school leaders in England perceive the benefits and…

Since the mid-1980s, health service restructuring in New Zealand has strengthened managerialism, arguably detracting from professional considerations. Professional leaders without line-management responsibilities have replaced social work departments headed by a professional social worker. An emerging social work contribution to interdisciplinary…

This article explores teaching assistants' (TAs) perceptions of suggestions that English schools should encourage large numbers of "low-achieving" school leavers to become apprentice teaching assistants. It reports on a piece of qualitative research that aimed to capture teaching assistants' views of these proposals. Semi-structured…

The current study attempted to identify students' of Arabic programs beliefs about their chosen programs. To achieve this purpose, a survey was developed to collect the data from randomly selected students in liberal-arts and education-based programs at Kuwait University. The results showed that students were statistically differentiated as a…

This qualitative study was designed to investigate teachers' perceptions of the impact of inclusion of children with special needs on their classes. Twenty participants were randomly selected from the 25 teachers who had volunteered for the study. These teacher participants completed a survey which was composed of 62 items dealing with attitudes…