Background: The global discourse on higher education underscores its pivotal role in personal development, societal progress and economic prosperity. However, actual implementation and practices within universities have not kept pace, and students with intellectual disability still struggle, as their journey towards accessing and succeeding in…

Although research in critical literacy has long been conducted in English as a second language contexts, a modicum of critical literacy research in English as a foreign language (EFL) contexts in which English is seldom used outside the classroom environment has also been undertaken. This article aims to discuss the introduction of critical…

School practices and policies are often influenced by various research, nonprofit, for-profit, and philanthropic organizations. To help understand their influence, this article provides a framework accounting for the variety of school improvement organizations (SIOs) and summarizes debates regarding their benefits and risks. I cluster SIOs as…

For chemistry, where learners are required to integrate experimental observations with theoretical knowledge, laboratory work appears to be a viable instructional strategy. However, research has shown that chemistry laboratory instruction often fails to live up to its potential. The scheduling practice in higher education (HE) separating theory…

Purpose: The article distinguishes between the three concepts of standardization of the tasks of pedagogical action in modern educational systems: the traditional concept of standardizing educational goals through curricula, the literacy concept of psychometric standardization, and the concept of competence, which can be developed in different…

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4: Quality Education has recently driven more outreach teacher professional development (PD) programmes. While research evidence shows the importance of school-university partnerships for effective PD programmes, this research area remains under-investigated in many developing countries,…

The course 'Inclusive Education' at the University of Vienna (UV) serves as a microcosm of national and international discourses. Policies such as the UN-CRPD run counter to established school systems and the latest developments in federal and state legislation. Against this backdrop, a small-scale study has been conducted to (a) examine the…

We set out to investigate preservice teachers' beliefs about sources of teaching knowledge and their motivation to learn from practice and theory in teacher education in a longitudinal study (n = 96, at the beginning of the study). Participants placed more trust in experiential knowledge sources compared with formalized sources and participants'…

Professional development programs for teachers in higher education are often characterized by top-down approaches, which fail to make appreciable differences in teaching practices. This study uses a qualitative approach to explore activity-oriented design (AOD) as an instrument for collaborative learning in higher education teacher professional…

The purpose of this qualitative interpretive study was to explore how 43 educators from Ecuador made meaning of a nine-month international continuing professional education (CPE) program at a higher education institution in the United States. Often categorized generally as study abroad, international CPE encompasses unique modalities focusing on…

The extrapolation of test scores to a target domain - that is, association between test performances and relevant real-world outcomes - is critical to valid score interpretation and use. This study examined the relationship between Duolingo English Test (DET) speaking scores and university stakeholders' evaluation of DET speaking performances. A…

Purpose: Many researchers partner with schools but may be unfamiliar with practices for initiating contact and sustaining relationships with school leaders. Partnering with schools requires significant effort from the researcher to nurture communication and trust. This can pose challenges for researchers who are new to the field, have relocated to…

Interest in active learning continues to grow worldwide. Although the large volume of active learning research has provided a myriad of ways to implement active learning in the classroom, the construct remains underdeveloped and difficult to operationalize because of three main issues in the research literature: (a) the confusion surrounding what…

Educational institutions face challenges of bridging gaps between teaching, research, and practice to ensure that students' knowledge and competencies are current and relevant to practitioner communities. Research apprenticeship is a student research model that supports students in becoming knowledgeable and competent members of the IS research…

The iterative process of ethnography not only constructs theory, but its methodology should embody theory. Developing a theoretical framework often demands adjustments in methodology, to leverage previous work and to avoid assumptions compounding through the magnification of blind spots. New theory in policy-engaged ethnography has emphasised the…