The problem this study explored was that despite the various methods of differentiating professional development content to meet the needs of K-12 teachers, teacher professional development programming does not meet the career growth needs of many professional educators. The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how ten K-12…

Youth are social actors who not only engage in but transform culture. Promoting plurality often means letting go of preconceived notions of power in youth social circles. Here, we utilize parent-child ethnography and the lens of queer theory to analyse four stories of youth identity exploration and answer the following research questions: 1) how…

Bourdieu argued that class-based inequalities influenced educational outcomes and this paper illustrates the relevance of Bourdieu's concepts in understanding one specific community. A wider study by the authors used the concept of habitus to identify factors which impacted on the participants--predominantly white working-class…

The issue of how schools work in partnership with each other and with other organisations has always been of interest to school leaders, policymakers, and practitioners. This article adds to the body of research on partnerships in part by focussing on school to school partnerships and in part through the use of activity theory as an analytical…

In response to a growing need for STEM professionals, this study reports the results of the initial validation of a refined survey instrument that purports to measure the five constructs of the social cognitive career theory framework within the subjects of mathematics, science, engineering and technology. To investigate the instrument's…

Cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) has been used in several development studies, but few have used it for the purposes of formative assessment. This article reports from a study where the activity system was used to conduct a historical and actual-empirical analysis of the assessment culture at a purposively selected school. The article…

Despite the fact that innovative behaviour of teachers is important for the quality of teaching in our knowledge society, there is still little research into leadership and organizational factors that influence teachers' innovative behaviour. By combining self-concept leadership theory, social exchange theory and a hierarchical model of the…

We illustrate how early adolescents use different patterns of ability feedback to promote a positive self-concept of ability (SCA) in mathematics. Students can simultaneously use ability appraisals from parents and teachers, while also drawing information from peer, dimensional, and temporal comparisons. Although we find these five sources are…

Purpose: Relying on the principles of the social exchange theory, the current study is aimed at investigating the impact of team-member exchange relationships (TMX) among school management team (SMT) members on school outcomes (organizational citizenship behavior [OCB], job satisfaction and innovation) via the mediating role of leader-member…

Globalization has become one of the most recurrent concepts in social and political sciences. More often than not, however, the concept is handled without much of a properly articulated theory capable of explaining its historical origin and expansion. For education researchers attempting to elucidate how global changes and processes affect their…

Psychological factors such as grit and self-efficacy have been heralded as powerful predictors of performance. Their joint contribution to the prediction of early adolescents' school success has not been fully investigated, however. The purpose of this study was to examine U.S. elementary and middle school students' (N = 2,430) grit (assessed as…

In this article we considered the relevance of specific claims that 'multi-faith' approaches to Religious Education (RE) play a role in promoting good community relations. In doing so, we adopted a social-psychological perspective where engaging in positive and meaningful interactions with diverse others reduces prejudice. Survey responses from 92…

Middle school is a critical time in students' learning of mathematics, something a Learning Management System (LMS) is designed to help parents support. What remains unknown is how parents use an LMS to monitor their children's progress in mathematics. This qualitative case study explored how parents from one midAtlantic middle school with 543…

Middle school is a critical time in students' learning of mathematics, something a Learning Management System (LMS) is designed to help parents support. What remains unknown is how parents use an LMS to monitor their children's progress in mathematics. This qualitative case study explored how parents from one midAtlantic middle school with 543…

Understanding factors that impact teacher implementation of learning from professional development is critical in order to maximize the educational and financial investment in teacher professional learning. This multi-case qualitative investigation elucidates factors that influence the appropriation of instructional tools associated with…