The purpose of this article is to present the results of a multi-site case study designed to investigate students' experiences as participants in four week-long immersion programs (New York City, Peru, the Czech Republic, Chicago). Results highlight the significance of the context of the trips and specific characteristics of the trip (e.g.,…

With the teacher concerns theory (Fuller, 1969) as a theoretical framework, this study has set out to examine how physical education teacher candidates perceive their implementation of the Personal and Social Responsibility Model (Hellison, 2003) and how they actually implement it during field experience. Five teacher candidates (three female, two…

The research aimed broadly to understand how Botswana's written government curricula for music are interpreted by music teachers as well as teachers' ideals for music teaching, and to what extent they thought it was possible to achieve those ideals. Grundy's writing on curriculum based on Habermas' technical, practical and emancipatory interests…

In this paper, we present a microanalysis of a specialized STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) high school teacher's experience of self-initiated science inquiry curriculum reform. We examine the meanings of these two constructs: "inquiry curriculum" and "curriculum change" through the process lens of interactions, actions,…

This study is to investigate the reflective learning in a group of secondary school students who participated in an educational tour to Liannan, which is located in a rural area in Guangdong Province, Mainland China. The specific aim is to develop a framework to describe the learning in an educational tour. For this purpose, data were collected…

During a summer cruise to Mexico and Central America, students earned academic credit for doctoral-level coursework in qualitative research approaches and data collection and analysis. This study explored how participants, 16 doctoral students at a midwestern university, perceived experiential education and its effect upon their understanding of…

This paper describes changes which took place in 37 Hong Kong primary schools where class sizes were reduced from 38 to between 20 and 25. Chinese, English and mathematics classes were observed over three years from Primary 1 (aged 6) to Primary 3. For 75% of observations no child was the focus of the teacher's attention in large classes. Reducing…

Purpose: Because of high drop-out rates among the students entering vocational education in Denmark retention of students has become pivotal to Danish educational policy. Thus vocational educational training (VET) colleges have been asked to work on implementing different kinds of retention initiatives and as a result, most colleges have…

This article explores the themes of trust and ethical conduct in social research, with particular attention to the trust that can develop between the members of a research team as well as between researchers and the researched. The authors draw upon a three-year empirical study of destinations and outcomes for young people excluded from…

Conceptualisations of disability that emphasise the contextual and cultural nature of disability and the embodiment of these within a national system of data collection present a number of challenges especially where this process is devolved to schools. The requirement for measures based on contextual and subjective experiences gives rise to…

The present study utilised naturalistic observation to assess the impact of parental departure during daily drop-off at preschool on children's settling into daily preschool routines. Forty-six 3-5-year-old children and their parents/caregivers were observed during morning drop-off at preschool. Longer latencies of parent/caregiver leaving were…

This article demonstrates that the variance of three or four observations can be expressed in terms of the range and the first order differences of the observations. A more general result, which holds for any number of observations, is also stated.

The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS; Lord et al., J Autism Dev Disord, 30(3):205-223, 2000) is widely accepted as a "gold standard" diagnostic instrument, but it is of restricted utility with very young children. The purpose of the current project was to modify the ADOS for use in children under 30 months of age. A modified ADOS, the…

The study of dynamic and nonlinear change has been a valuable development in psychotherapy process research. However, little advancement has been made in describing how moment-by-moment affective processes contribute to larger units of change. The purpose of this study was to examine observable moment-by-moment sequences in emotional processing as…

This article outlines the "Inquiry Cycle" at Ilam School in New Zealand. It is underpinned by the main tenets of the New Zealand Curriculum "Teaching as Inquiry" statement. Ilam's cycle involves seven core elements that evolved over a two-year, whole-school journey focused on developing a meaningful localised curriculum…