The ways in which the language of reformers intersects with and informs reform implementation is important to our understanding of how education policy impacts practice. To explore this issue, we employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the language used by a 21st century skills-focused reform organization to promote its program…

This paper contextualizes contemporary urban teachers' online dissent in public discussions of education reform in relation to past educational crisis narratives to interpret recent shifts in the structure of education reform dialogue in the United States. It does so by examining the form and content of compositions in which teachers respond to…

Crude and dangerous ideas about the genetic heritability of intelligence, and a supposed biological basis for the Black/White achievement gap, are alive and well inside the education policy process but taking new and more subtle forms. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, the paper analyses recent hereditarian writing, in the UK and the USA, and…

The paper proposes a theoretical and methodological framework based on a pluralistic, concerted approach to the study of activities that take place in and through speech interactions. The framework has a general scope, applying to any collective activity taking form through language interactions. It contributes to a fuller understanding of the…

As the tools and modes of literate practice continually emerge, so too must our critical approaches to understanding their expression. While media production has been praised for its potential to provide youth a voice to challenge dominant narratives, various questions remain as to what happens at the multimodal levels of composition in terms of…

This paper investigates global gender policy discourses within the education realm in post-genocide Rwanda. Drawing on interview data from students in seven secondary schools and Unterhalter's gender framework (Unterhalter, Elaine. 2007. "Gender, Schooling and Global Social Justice." New York, NY: Routledge), I analyse the extent global…

This article focuses on the theoretical-methodological question of how to identify reform-induced changes in school mathematics. The issue arose in our project The Evolution of the Discourse of School Mathematics (EDSM), in which we studied transformations in high-stakes examinations taken by students in England at the end of compulsory schooling.…

Recent research has shown that for some topics, messages to refute and revise misconceptions may backfire. The current research offers one possible account for this backfire effect (i.e., the ironic strengthening of belief in erroneous information after an attempted refutation) from an educational psychology perspective and examines whether…

Qatar is in the midst of a systemic education reform, Education For a New Era, steered by RAND's (a nonprofit research organization) analysis and report of Qatar's Educational system. Driven by a neoliberal agenda, the reform includes international curricula, curriculum standards, teacher licensure, and professional standards for school leaders…

Research has shown that educators may be reluctant to implement group work in their teaching due to concerns about students partaking in off-task behaviours. However, such off-task interactions have been shown to promote motivation, trust, and rapport-building. This paper details a study in which student groups were video recorded as they engaged…

Data use is becoming more important in higher education. In this case study, a team of teachers from a teacher education college was supported in data-based decision making by means of the data team procedure. This data team studied the reasons why students drop out. A team's success depends in part on whether the team is able to develop and apply…

In the present study we investigated the effect of test format on oral performance in terms of test scores and discourse features (accuracy, fluency, and complexity). Moreover, we explored how the scores obtained on different test formats relate to such features. To this end, 23 Iranian EFL learners participated in three test formats of monologue,…

Socioculturally and sociolinguistically, gender can have a profound effect on learning and teaching English language as a foreign language. Also learning cooperatively in which both female and male students are involved seems to play a constructive role in creating and enhancing students' performance, achievement and competence of a foreign…

One of the recent issues in English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) writing instruction has been the quest for a more effective way to give feedback to L2 learners' writing drafts. Although teacher-learner writing conferences have been increasingly used for providing ample opportunity for negotiating revisions, relatively little attention…

In order to improve her practice, a teacher educator explored emotions as catalysts for teaching and learning by asking the research question, "How can I support preservice teachers' emotional intelligence (EI), as well as my own, as we negotiate the impact of strong emotions in the pedagogical environment?" Three levels of reflection…