Two artists involved in "socially engaged art" practice were invited to work with art education teacher candidates and instructors in an effort to rethink notions of teaching, learning and art. We initiated this residency, which we called "The Summerhill Residency", to examine how learning encounters might create environments…

Improving teacher quality is arguably the most effective way to improve student achievement. Online professional development (OPD) has great potential to improve teacher quality. There is a dearth of scientific research, however, on whether changes in teachers' knowledge and instructional practices resulting from OPD are linked to changes in…

More than 90% of the nation's 1.2 million military children attend civilian-operated public schools. Education researchers, however, often overlook the educational experiences and needs of military children attending civilian-operated public schools (i.e., schools that are administered by and under the purview of local education agencies). This…

The Measures of Effective Teaching project has collected performance data using multiple indicators from over three thousand teachers across six urban districts. In the second year of the study, classes of students were randomly assigned to teachers in order to assess the impact of assignment bias on performance judgments. This article discusses…

In this paper, we review empirical research on language teaching at a distance, published between 2005 and 2010. After compiling a list of journals, we went through a multi-stage process of analyzing relevant studies. This overview of research is based on twenty-four articles. The content analysis of research studies led our inquiry on topics…

Design-based research (DBR) evolved near the beginning of the 21st century and was heralded as a practical research methodology that could effectively bridge the chasm between research and practice in formal education. In this article, the authors review the characteristics of DBR and analyze the five most cited DBR articles from each year of this…

The article continues the discussion of the five quality principles proposed by Heikkinen, Huttunen, and Syrjala, published in 2007 in "Educational Action Research". In the present article, the authors reconsider the five principles: historical continuity; reflexivity; dialectics; workability; and evocativeness. These five principles are…

In the social sciences, inquiry into the relationship between storytelling and politics is based on a notion of historical continuity. One problem is the possible trap of inevitability inherent in this notion--that something which happened "had to happen". Hannah Arendt's conception of political theory as storytelling overcomes this trap,…

The use of narratives in the social sciences has drastically increased throughout recent decades. They are mainly used as a way of collecting data and as a way of promoting professional development. This article sheds light on how a practitioner-researcher engaged in narrative writing and how this helped in what is hereby termed a reflective…

This review examined the effectiveness of critical factors in instruction for improving the reading comprehension of middle school students with learning disabilities. Five critical factors were identified: (i) type of instructional methods, (ii) self-monitoring, (iii) components of reading incorporated, (iv) fidelity of instruction (scripted vs.…

This paper contains cultural anthropological research on various discipline measures used within the classrooms in India, United Kingdom, China, Africa, and the United States. My recent visit to schools in India on study abroad programs prompted my desire to research across the globe different methods of classroom management discipline conducted…

We present three models of equity and show how these, along with the statistical measures used to evaluate results, impact interpretation of equity in education reform. Equity can be defined and interpreted in many ways. Most equity education reform research strives to achieve equity by closing achievement gaps between groups. An example is given…

In this article I explore epistemological diversity in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) from the perspective that obtains if we examine the moral ends of research, and we ask: In what ways does epistemological diversity relate to enhancing the social value and educational relevance of the research generated by the instructed SLA…

We present data collected from the research project funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Spain entitled "Audiovisual Narratives and Intercultural Relations in Education." One of the aims of the research was to determine the nature of thought processes occurring during audiovisual narratives. We studied the possibility of…

Although any mainstream thought is subject to theoretical challenges, the challenges to the mainstream cognitive perspective on transfer have had an unfortunate divisive effect. This article takes a pragmatic view that transfer perspectives are simply designed objects (Plomp & Nieveen, 2007), which provide different information for different…