Following the economic recession and resulting financial cuts to English education budgets introduced in 2010, the number of local authority educational psychology teams adopting a partially or fully-traded model of service delivery began to gain momentum. This study sought to investigate the response to trading and its impact on the role of the…

This review provides a critical appraisal of Kubow and Min's paper. It teases out their conception of "liberalism" and argues that the classical notion of liberalism as a political theory that advocates individual liberty based on assumptions of the unencumbered autonomous individual has lost currency. This is because over the years…

American agriculturalists are divided on a variety of issues related to production and consumption of food. Broadly speaking, two groups have emerged along two ideological lines: agrarian populism, which articulates conventional agricultural values, and neo-agrarianism, which shares some nonconventional agricultural values. Although both groups…

This article first offers a survey of what has become an area of increasing interest in higher education: the rise of the so-called "student-consumer". This has been linked in part to the marketisation of higher education and the increased personal financial contributions individual students make towards their higher education. Drawing…

Since the introduction of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) in England in 2008, assessment of children has taken a formal and standardized measurable approach. Such an approach goes against most findings of play-oriented research. Thus, the project reported here employed participatory action research with practitioners in order to identify…

This exploratory study identifies aspects of pedagogical design and teaching practice that enabled creative capacities through the lens of the researcher's lived experience. A guiding research question in this investigation follows: (a) "What is the nature of the relationship between creative activity and transformative learning" and (b)…

This study, conducted by two researchers who were also multiple-choice question (MCQ) test item writers at a private English-medium university in an English as a foreign language (EFL) context, was designed to shed light on the factors that influence test-takers' perceptions of difficulty in English for academic purposes (EAP) vocabulary, with the…

In this article, the authors outline and discuss the findings of a research study, which explored student teacher engagement with development education (DE) interventions implemented within Professional Master of Education (PME) programmes across eight Irish Higher Education Institutions. Interpretivist methods were employed incorporating…

The "sociological imagination"--the recognition of the relationship between "private troubles" and "public issues" (Mills [1959] 2000. "The Sociological Imagination". Oxford: Oxford University Press: 8)--is central to the discipline of sociology. This article reports findings of a 2014 study which…

In argumentative writing, the presence of logical fallacy, which can be simply defined as error in reasoning, shows either illegitimate arguments or irrelevant points that will undermine the strength of a claim. Despite its significant role in determining the quality of an argument, the topic of logical fallacy has not been widely explored in the…

There are many unmet needs among parents of children with autism for parent respite and social time for their children. The use of undergraduate student volunteers is a potential strategy for meeting some of these needs. Separate focus groups for parents and for undergraduates were convened to assess feasibility, comfort, reservations, and mutual…

Social networking sites (SNS) are popular; adolescents and young adults can display sexual content. The purpose of this study was to explore female college students' perception of sexual reference posts on Facebook. Female students aged 18-24 years were recruited at two large state universities. The study and analysis took place from September…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand the lived experiences of the international students using their university's social media, through a lens of customer engagement (CE) in the services marketing literature. Design/methodology/approach: A case study was conducted in an Australian university. Three semi-structured focus groups with…

Background: Individuals who have autism spectrum disorders (ASD) commonly experience social anxiety (SA). Disentangling SA symptoms from core ASD characteristics is complex, partly due to diagnostic overshadowing and co-occurring alexithymia. Causal and maintaining mechanisms for SA in ASD are underexplored, but it is feasible that there is an ASD…

Interdisciplinary (i.e., university-wide programming) and disciplinary (i.e., programming open to participants from one college or department) teaching development programs for graduate students have been used for many years in higher education. Currently, research on the benefits of these teaching models remains scant in terms of a contextualized…