The article addresses the issues surrounding the importance and impact of 'hinterlands' in the construction of European higher education systems and in the formation of sectoral policy. It draws on studies of Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom to illustrate different policy approaches and shows how in some countries…

Background: Despite the establishment of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) in 2010, child nutrition programs continue to experience challenges impacting participation. Prior qualitative studies have explored how to reduce barriers to implementation of these programs in schools, but few studies have examined attitudes held by students, who…

Background: Despite the establishment of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (HHFKA) in 2010, child nutrition programs continue to experience challenges impacting participation. Prior qualitative studies have explored how to reduce barriers to implementation of these programs in schools, but few studies have examined attitudes held by students, who…

Background: Assessing individual and organisational capacity for evidence use is essential for developing evidence-based strategies. Aims and objectives: This study aimed to assess the psychometric and practical properties of existing tools to assess the capacity to use evidence at the individual and organisational levels of health policy and…

Competence-based approaches (CBAs) in education have become an internationally important educational policy concept in recent decades. However, a substantial body of research has suggested that in order to understand and explain the evolution of CBAs, there is a need to analyse curriculum-making as a complex and multi-layered practice. To…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how feedback loops function within the Ministry of Education (MoE) Provincial Education Directorate (PED) in Herat province of Afghanistan, how the MoE/PED collects, analyzes, and uses feedback for improving its policies and programs, and responds to the issues and barriers identified at the…

Educational policy in the UK and beyond increasingly focuses on promoting skills that encourage learners to be independent thinkers and to self-manage their own learning. While the educational benefits of metacognition (i.e., thinking about and managing one's own thinking) are widely acknowledged, little attention has been paid to teachers'…

While community colleges enroll high proportions of disabled students, limited research exists on considerations that college personnel should account for in meeting disabled students' varied needs and strengths. This article explores the impacts of policies and processes on disabled community college students and presents five policy-related…

This paper focuses on the complex, entangled relationships between research and policy and suggests this is a very important topic in the contemporary era of so-called, 'evidence-based' or 'research-based' policy in education. The paper argues that we can only ever have 'evidence-informed' and 'research-informed' policy because all policy is an…

This article examines how the 'teacher quality' agenda, evident in the globalised discourse on education policy, constructs changes to teachers' work and teacher education. We undertake a critical policy analysis of two reports from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), addressing three issues. First, we discuss the…

In mathematics education, there is general agreement regarding the significance of mathematical literacy (also quantitative literacy or numeracy) for informed citizenship, which often requires evaluating the use of numbers in public policy discourse. We hold that such an evaluation must accommodate the necessarily fragile relation between the…

This collaborative self-study examines how five higher education institutions in British Columbia (BC), Canada, have achieved momentum with openness and are implementing and sustaining their efforts. A goal of this research was to see whether an institutional self-assessment tool--adapted from blended learning and institutional transformation…

The Evidence to Action project (2019-2021), led by MDRC and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) and supported by Arnold Ventures, initiated a body of work designed to disentangle the barriers that exist between research and state-level higher education policy and partnered with state higher education agencies to…

Rural life is more complex than it is perhaps credited. This edited volume explores several themes that highlight such complexities, particularly in terms of what they imply for rural teaching and learning. These themes include the geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic diversity within and across rural communities; the notion that rurality is…

Schools provide many services that aid children's development, well-being, and academic success. Key providers include mental health agencies, social workers, school counselors and nurses, as well as school officials and other employees. Yet quite possibly the most important component of these services--often overlooked--is the parent. This policy…