This article explores the concept of community of enquiry through an examination of 3 case studies: (a) a school-based community of enquiry involving pupils, teachers, and researchers; (b) a community of enquiry involving teachers from around 100 different schools in a Scottish local authority, together with policy advisers and researchers; and…

This action research study addresses the link between building evaluation capacity and enhancing evaluation use for learning. The author shares her experiences and reports on the evidence collected from a set of self-evaluation capacity-building interventions that she implemented. Using a mixed-method approach, the author first determined that the…

Leadership depends on the situation. Few social scientists would dispute the validity of this statement. But the statement can be interpreted in many different ways, depending, at least in part, on what one means by leadership. This article begins with a definition of leadership and a brief description of 3 historically important theories of…

In the last 15 years, agri-environmental programmes in Australia have been underpinned by a neoliberal regime of governing which seeks to foster participation and "bottom-up" change at the regional level at the same time as encouraging farmers to become entrepreneurial and improve their productivity and environmental performance without…

Graduate counseling programs are proficient in training direct service providers but less able to teach the business of sustaining a community agency's services. Modern philanthropy emphasizes social advocacy by investing in change that benefits the local community and respects the diverse cultural experiences of potential clients and…

The purpose of this article is to examine contemporary transformations in early childhood education, in light of developments in policy, theory and practice, and to chart significant changes and continuities over the last 40 years. The Plowden Report had a significant impact on early childhood education, because it reified developmental theories,…

This paper describes a comprehensive model of alignment that provides a foundation for meaningful reporting of students' academic progress over time. The model includes both horizontal and vertical alignment as integral parts of the development of content standards, test blueprints, items, item pools, instruments, performance level descriptors,…

Educational administrative practitioners evaluate theories, implement practices, and refine leadership strategies daily. The exploration of the leadership gap between theory and praxis is a quantum undertaking. Leadership from the educational perspective takes many forms and presents many challenges. This document examines leadership from several…

This comparative case study investigated the teaching practices of secondary English language arts teachers who are reading endorsed versus secondary English language arts teachers who are not reading endorsed. Florida Department of Education mandated that all reading teachers, and strongly encouraged all English language arts teachers be reading…

This report set out to profile the Missouri Career Ladder program by delving beneath the surface and comparing how the program works in practice (based on stakeholder accounts) with how it works in theory (based on published statutes and regulations). The authors found that in many respects the program operates as one might expect. Districts…

In the mainstream discourse on child development and education, 'school readiness' has been conceptualized as the skills and knowledge that children need when they enter school in order to learn effectively in the school environment. However, school readiness is an idea which is entwined with our beliefs about child development and child needs (E.…

"VideoPaper Builder" (VPB) was originally funded in 2001 through the National Science Foundation's "Bridging Research and Practice" program in recognition of the software's promise to articulate the relevance and facilitate the dissemination of educational research to practicing teachers. After four years and two subsequent…

This paper reports on a study of student learning about collaboration and discusses the effectiveness of different forms of assessment in facilitating learning. The study was conducted in a large health and social care faculty in which all students on pre-qualifying professional programmes learn together in modules aimed at developing…

Approximately 1,200 institutions of higher education in the United States offer a degree in early childhood education, but recent research questions the strength of the relationship between teachers having a degree and benefits to child development and learning. However, there has been little empirical focus on the "quality" of degree programs.…

This mixed-methods study probed the effectiveness of three kinds of objects (video, theory, metaphor) as common reference points for conversations between online learners (student teachers). Individuals' degree of detail-focus was examined as a potentially interacting covariate and the outcome measure was learners' level of tacit knowledge related…