Phonological awareness, an understanding that spoken language is comprised of individual sounds, is an important construct that has implications for educational assessment and intervention. Unfortunately, the relationship between phonological awareness and its many operationalizations is ambiguous, resulting in both theoretical and practical…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to examine factors which influence responses on open-ended evaluations of training courses. Design/methodology/approach: Course participants completed open-ended evaluation forms about their experience on a course. These consisted of 377 senior teachers attending a training programme dealing with child abuse.…

How can we help all children learn what they need to know to prepare for the future? In every country/region that is participating in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a study of the literacy skills of 15-year-old youth, there is a huge gap between the best and worst performing students. This shows the need for…

Along with the rest of the education sector universities have been encouraged to develop strategies for educational improvement. The strategies that have emerged have been heavily influenced by the policies and priorities of the government and government agencies, such as the Quality Assurance Agency and the Higher Education Funding Council, and…

Numerous researchers have speculated on and attempted to quantify the impact of policies designed to increase school choice and competition between schools, and they have reached widely differing conclusions. In this article, we provide an overview of the research that focuses on the potential achievement effects of greater private sector…

Faculty development research historically reported details on the types of programming available and the format of delivery. This research instead sought to uncover the underpinnings of the goals behind development efforts at community colleges. Findings indicate that teaching and learning issues remain central, with faculty interests serving as…

This article offers a German response to John Hull's recent article on "religious education in Germany and England" (in "BJRE", volume 27, issue 1). The author claims that recent developments have brought religious education in both countries much closer together than in the past and that the differences between the respective…

This essay builds on and extends scholarly discussion of the role and functions of Institutional Research (IR), especially with regard to the community college. As institutional "conscience," the primary value of IR is assisting in the identification of organizational weaknesses and challenges and helping to convert weaknesses into strengths and…

The no child left be act of 2001 (NCLB) emphasizes educational accountability for all students. Twenty-eight states have policies to aggregate student participation and proficiency data for schools for the deaf in NCLB reports. The remaining states account for these students in other ways: referring student data to "sending" schools and…

Non-public education can be viewed as one way of decentralizing the provision of education. The present study explores the ways in which non-public education is understood along with the scope of that education in countries belonging to the OECD. It focuses for the most part on the situation in Poland. The role of non-public kindergartens and…

This Support Document was produced by the authors based on their research for the report, "Assessing and Acknowledging Learning through Non-Accredited Community Adult Language, Literacy and Numeracy Programs," and is an added resource for further information. There were five phases of this project: Phase 1 comprised further interrogation…

This report is based on the discussions of the February 2008 "Teaching by Choice: Beyond 2 + 2" conference, convened by the American Association of Community Colleges to focus on the growing role of community colleges as providers of teacher education and source of professional development for elementary, middle and secondary teachers of science,…

This second edition of "Key Data on Teaching Languages at School in Europe" contains 44 indicators in five chapters entitled "Context," "Organisation," "Participation," "Teachers" and "Teaching Processes." It has been produced in collaboration with Eurostat and belongs to the "Key…

The Swedish school system comprises: (1) Pre-primary school (Forskola), typical age 1-5; (2) Preschool class in the compulsory school (Grundskola) typical age 6 (participation voluntary); (3) Compulsory school, typical age 7-16, grades 1-9, and (4) Upper secondary school, 17 programmes (4 mainly academic, 13 vocational), typical age 16-19, grades…

Cross-country evidence on student achievement might be hampered by omitted country characteristics such as language or legal differences. This paper uses cross-state variation in Germany, whose sixteen states share the same language and legal system, but pursue different education policies. The same results found previously across countries hold…