The central aim of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the recently revised elementary curriculum for arts education in Iran. The study employed an educational criticism method and was conducted in two elementary schools. Data were collected by observation, semi-structured interviews and curriculum documents over a four-month period.…

Higher education is commonly understood as the gateway to better, higher-paying jobs. This paper draws on longitudinal survey and interview data to explore how different groups of young people, those who left school at 18 and those graduating from higher education, negotiated pathways into employment or otherwise during the recent economic…

In an effort to document teachers' enactments of new reform in science teaching, valid and scalable measures of science teaching using engineering design are needed. This study describes the development and testing of an approach for documenting and characterizing elementary science teachers' multiday enactments of engineering design-based science…

Undergraduate programmes on construction management and other closely related built environment disciplines are currently taught and assessed on a modular basis. This is the case in the UK and in many other countries globally. However, it can be argued that professionally oriented programmes like these are better assessed on a non-modular basis,…

In this study, we investigate sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students' achievement in nonlinear (quadratic or cubic) proportional problems regarding length, area, and volume of enlarged figures. In addition, we examine students' solution strategies for the problems and obstacles that prevent students from answering the problems correctly by…

The purpose of this study was to examine adolescent mothers' perceptions of how individuals within the schools viewed them and how those views shaped their educational experiences. The sample consisted of 83 primarily Hispanic adolescent mothers who participated in one of 19 semi-structured focus group interviews during the 2014-2015 school year.…

We sought to understand how teachers' perspectives on standards-based instructional practices, classroom assessment, and external testing do or do not show coherence and alignment. Based on survey methods (n = 155) and interviews with a sample of secondary school teachers (n = 9) in a large urban district in the USA, we explored general trends and…

Introduction: Many studies in physical education (PE) have sought to identify and categorize the modes of student interaction in order to gain greater insight into the nature of cooperative activity. More others recent studies have examined how modes of interaction evolve on the basis of the modes of collective activity that they generate. These…

Recent years have witnessed a gradual increase in international research on the effects of parental incarceration on families and prisoners both in the short, medium and long term. However, the rights of children with a parent in prison is a subject which, in the Irish context at least, has been ill considered to date by policy and law makers.…

Over the past two decades, Turkey has initiated a reform movement to change her classroom assessment system to accommodate performance-based alternative assessment methods in schools. However, research investigating the impact of assessment reform on learning and teaching in schools report that performance assessment approaches have not been…

Environmental education scholars have argued for the need to focus on identity as a more predictive factor than attitude of individuals' environmental behavior. We examine individuals' decision-making as a mediating process between identity and behavior. University undergraduates (N = 299) were surveyed, with a select sub-sample interviewed. As…

Dialogic pedagogy is being promoted in science teacher education but the literature on dialogic pedagogy tends to focus on explicit voices, and so runs the risk of overlooking the important role that material objects often play in science education. In this paper we use the findings of a teacher survey and classroom case study to argue that there…

A cappella is a musical performance genre with a long history. Although many people compose and arrange a cappella works, the connection between a cappella and musical creativity has not yet been considered. This study examines the background of the musical creativities framework [Burnard, P. 2012. "Musical Creativities in Practice."…

Cognitive interviewing (CI) provides a method of systematically collecting validity evidence of response processes for questionnaire items. CI involves a range of techniques for prompting individuals to verbalise their responses to items. One such technique is concurrent verbalisation, as developed in Think Aloud Protocol (TAP). This article…

This article addresses the role of general music education within the framework of cultural diversity. The empirical part of the article focuses on teachers in Swedish-speaking minority schools in Finland and their perceptions of the relationship between music and multicultural perspectives. The results showed that in some instances it took some…