Research on the learning and teaching of science is an important field for scholarly inquiry by faculty in science departments. Such research has proved to be an efficient means for improving the effectiveness of instruction in physics. A basic topic in introductory physics is used to illustrate how discipline-based education research has helped…

The primacy of the research question in designing studies affords an opportunity for enhancing collaborations between researchers and "practitioners". This paper describes the use of a modified Delphi technique to co-generate research questions for a collaborative research study co-funded by a university and a natural history museum.…

Learning is a continuous process, and through the process of learning, people acquire or construct new knowledge; this knowledge is evaluated implicitly or explicitly (Hofer, 2000). Research on beliefs about knowledge has become an important field of inquiry in educational research (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997). This field of research has emerged…

Virtual schools have the potential to improve student learning--but so far, as asserted in this article, research tells little about how online instruction affects student performance. Most of the studies that pointed to good student outcomes were small in scale and based on specific programs or products. Few provide data to help understand…

Increasingly, "research" is not being conducted in a separate group in an organization; rather, it is being integrated into the fabric of the organization. Google recently described such an integrated, "hybrid" model of software research that is characterized by cycles of short duration and small-scope activity that is ongoing…

Children's research abilities have become increasingly recognised by adults, yet children remain excluded from the academy. This restricts children's freedom to make choices in matters affecting them, underestimates their capabilities and denies children particular rights. The present paper reports on young children's problem-solving as part of a…

This article looks across six years of teacher leadership research to explore what today's teachers want (and don't want) from teacher leaders. A secondary analysis was conducted on volumes of teacher leader data, focused on teacher leader-teacher interactions, using a "justice" and "integrity"-oriented framework.…

Threshold concepts were introduced nearly 10 years ago by Ray Land and Jan Meyer. This work has spawned four international conferences and hundreds of papers. Although the idea has clearly gained traction in higher education, this sub-field does not yet have a fully fledged research methodology or a strong critical discourse about methodology.…

Teachers' and preservice teachers' attitudes toward students are mental states that may contribute to teachers' judgments and students' achievement. However, in the past, educational research has mainly focused on explicit attitudes and has hardly considered the pivotal role of implicit attitudes in predicting behavior. Drawing…

This review reports selected literature on theory, research, and practice in disciplinary literacy, primarily reading. The authors consider the ways this literature can be viewed through the lens of Lee S. Shulman's theory of Pedagogical Content Knowledge, which includes: subject matter content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and…

We contribute to debate about causal inferences in educational research in two ways. First, we quantify how much bias there must be in an estimate to invalidate an inference. Second, we utilize Rubin's causal model to interpret the bias necessary to invalidate an inference in terms of sample replacement. We apply our analysis to an inference…

Outcome-reporting bias occurs when primary studies do not include information about all outcomes measured in a study. When studies omit findings on important measures, efforts to synthesize the research using systematic review techniques will be biased and interpretations of individual studies will be incomplete. Outcome-reporting bias has been…

A teacher study group explores issues of home and community literacies with a goal of utilizing out-of-school literacies to support in-school literacy learning. The result was the beginning of a new mindfulness that allowed them to begin to recognize the existence and legitimacy of home and community literacies. They explored how their own biases…

The question of inclusive education is not straightforward. Despite all its good intentions, inclusive education, in practice faces numerous challenges today. This study analyses these challenges in the Swedish special education context. The author explores special educators' experiences, possibilities and challenges when applying inclusive…

The culture concept has been severely criticized for its top-down nature in TESOL, leading arguably to its falling out of favor in the field. But what of the fact that people do "live culturally" (Ingold, 1994)? This article describes a case study of culture from the bottom up--culture as understood and enacted by its individual users.…