Professional development is a well-established component of teacher change, and action research can make that change visible. In this study, quantitative and qualitative data were collected from 237 elementary teachers and intervention specialists from 33 federally-designated Appalachian counties of Southeastern Ohio who participated in the…

The goal for selecting the released set of test items was to have approximately 25% of each of the full item sets for mathematics content knowledge (MCK) and mathematics pedagogical content knowledge (MPCK) that would represent the full range of difficulty, content, and item format used in the TEDS-M study. The initial step in the selection was to…

This article explores the issue of older adults' access to and participation in higher education in two countries, Aotearoa New Zealand and Scotland. It discusses older adults' engagement with regard to patterns of participation and provision, using a critical educational gerontology approach. The two case studies, one in more theoretical terms,…

In an effort to teach students the basic knowledge of research methods and the realities of conducting research in the context of agencies in the community, faculty developed and implemented a service learning model for teaching research and program evaluation to foundation-year MSW students. A year-long foundation course was designed in which one…

3D virtual worlds can and have been used as a meeting place for distance education courses. Virtual worlds allow for group learning of the kind enjoyed by students gathered in a virtual classroom, where they know they are in a communal space, they are aware of the social process of learning and are affected by the presence and behaviour of their…

Supporting undergraduate students with their academic literacies has recently been a major focus in higher education in the UK. This paper explores the value of tutor mediation in the context of academic writing development among undergraduate business studies students in open and distance learning, following the dynamic assessment (DA) approach…

This quantitative study utilized secondary self-reported data from the 2008 administration of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey from two Texas public universities to investigate the pre-college demographic, academic, attitude, behavioral, and familial factors that may relate to students' self-reported political…

In this study we described an action research project enacted by a veteran Kindergarten teacher (Sarah) in the context of a professional development program. Over the course of a year, Sarah collaborated with other teachers in a small group to investigate how to use "Science Talks" to promote student learning in Kindergarten classrooms. A…

The notion of Indigenous epistemologies and "ways of knowing" continues to be undervalued within various academic disciplines, particularly those who continue to draw upon "scientific" approaches that colonise Indigenous peoples today. This paper will examine the politics of contested knowledge from the perspective of three…

The author reports on the U.S. Department of Education's "What Works Clearinghouse" that goes beyond "gold standard" research and sets standards for accepting other types of studies. As part of the Institute of Education Sciences' push to make research more relevant to educators, the federal clearinghouse has devised standards by which it can…

This paper presents a case study of students' awareness, experiences and perceptions of research in a "new" university in the UK. The findings are based on a questionnaire of almost 200 students and five small group interviews. Many of the students participating in this research perceived clear benefits to their learning from staff…

This paper reports on the experiences of a group of teachers engaged in an action research project to develop critical numeracy classrooms. The teachers initially explored how contexts in the media could be used as bases for activities to encourage student discernment and critical thinking about the appropriate use of the underlying mathematical…

The twofold objective of this paper is to communicate the findings and the methodology employed by a group of Italian researchers who have spent more than six years constructing an atlas of education in the ancient Italian states from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, and to compare the quantitative observations reported in an earlier…

Undergraduate science education curricula are traditionally composed of didactic instruction with a small number of laboratory courses that provide introductory training in research techniques. Research on learning methodologies suggests this model is relatively ineffective, whereas participation in independent research projects promotes enhanced…

Utilizing ecosocial theory and the notion of the environment as text, two teachers, the vice principal and a university researcher, engaged in a year-long, place-based, qualitative action research project in which they used the environment as the integrating context for teaching critical literacy, mathematics, and science. The project revealed…