Organisational defensive patterns, including skilled incompetence, organisational defensive routines and fancy footwork, are considered to be a hindrance to effective learning and innovation capacity building in all organisations. The purpose of this research is to investigate: 1) the perceptions of the influence of organisational defensive…

For decades, researchers have studied student achievement gaps in many countries. This article posits that a similar learning gap may be occurring among the organizations we call school systems--a potential gap between school systems that have maintained the status quo and those that have been working to innovate and improve. The case study…

This article reports on a study into how collaborative contexts influence the professional development of an early-career primary teacher, Julia. We describe the process of change by which Julia manages to make her planning to teach mathematics more flexible so as to adapt to student difficulties, and we analyse the role that joint reflection…

This article examines the impact of a faculty professional development effort on the understanding, confidence, and attitudes of education faculty related to program assessment activities. We applied literature on the adoption of innovations, institutional effectiveness, and professional development to a case study of a series of workshops on…

The next phase of high school reform is ripe with possibilities. Over the last 3 decades, educational research has identified a number of promising and effective high school models. Research demonstrates the benefits of career academies and early college schools. Schools that offer small, personalized environments; comprehensive approaches to…

What role can specialized schools with focus on mathematics, science, and technology have in sparking innovation? Such specialized schools can be and in some cases currently are leaders in promoting high-level content knowledge, creative and critical thinking, and problem solving--the basic ingredients of innovation. In this article, the author…

Under the Canadian constitution, responsibility for education is assigned to the provinces. In some provinces, universities are based in institution-specific statutes, in others, in system-wide legislation. Except for the provinces of Alberta and British Columbia, the provinces leave the quality assurance of academic activities to the…

At Desert Vista High School, near Phoenix, Arizona, Perkins Innovation Grant funding is being used to fund a program that is helping to prepare students for careers in engineering by giving them hands-on experience in areas like hydrogen generation and fuel cell utilization. As one enters Dan Zavaleta's automotive and engineering classroom and lab…

Learning Activity Management System (LAMS) has been trialled and used by users from many countries around the globe, but despite the positive attitude towards its potential benefits to pedagogical processes its adoption in practice has been uneven, reflecting how difficult it is to make a new technology based concept an integral part of the…

In this article Julianne Guillard describes her loosely structured approach to student participation in her Introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies course. She describes this approach toward participation (which helps create a welcoming, "safe space" environment) along with feedback, both positive and negative, from…

This study was conducted to explore secondary school teachers' innovative use of computer technologies in classroom. Questionnaires were distributed to 273 teachers in fourteen schools comprising 5 urban schools, 5 semi-urban schools and 4 rural schools. 241 were returned, and 231 valid questionnaires were used for data analysis, representing…

In recent years, L2 researchers from the sociocultural and cognitive linguistic perspectives have emphasized the importance of properly organized explicit and in-depth grammar instruction for second or foreign language learning. Such instruction is believed to lead learners to systematic understanding of the target features faster and more…

Most research regarding information and communication technology implementation has focused on teachers' technology use for personal, administrative, and preparatory purposes. Very little is known about how technology is authentically used to improve active student learning and enhance 21st century skills. The need for investigating how Cypriot…

These Proceedings are a written record of the research presented at the 34th Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME-NA 2012) held in Kalamazoo, Michigan, November 1-4, 2012. The theme of the conference, "Navigating Transitions along Continuums," focuses on…

This study considered outcomes when 27 academics explicitly developed and assessed student research skills in 28 regular (non-research methods) semester-length courses. These courses ranged from small (n = 17) to medium-large (n = 222) and included those from first year to masters in business, engineering, health science, humanities and science,…