For more than 50 years, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has been instrumental in developing an analytical model for understanding the relationships between educational policy (the intended curriculum), classroom and instructional practices (the implemented curriculum), and educational learning…

Cambourne and Turbill trace the growth, change and finally marginalisation of progressive approaches to literacy education by examining whole language philosophy in Australia from the 1960s to the present. Using a critical lens, Cambourne and Turbill describe how whole language has been positioned throughout the last nearly 50 years in terms of…

Many children struggle to learn to read, and these difficulties can persist well into adulthood. To address this problem, researchers have investigated the processes that underlie reading. An informative body of work has thus identified basic skills (e.g., decoding, vocabulary knowledge) as necessary for successful reading. Researchers also have…

One aim of the Evidence-based Practice in Science Education (EPSE) Network was to obtain a better understanding of the extent to which practitioners in science education recognise and make use of research findings in the course of their normal practice. The aim was realised through an interview and focus-group study of views of practitioners on…

Background/Context: Literacy education has always been hotly contested, and in England the debate has recently intensified in controversies over synthetic phonics teaching and the National Literacy Strategy. This article brings together four theoretical and policy contexts in studying this debate: (1) the long-standing and on-going "reading…

In this paper, we argue that teacher-researchers, especially those in politically contested school communities, should be encouraged to conduct critical action research that is contextually bound. Such a research methodology includes tenets of critical action research, postmodern and feminist theory, and attention to how oppression manifests in…

Democratic or equal participation in decision making is an ideal that community and academic stakeholders engaged in participatory research strive to achieve. This ideal, however, may compete with indigenous peoples' right to self-determination. Study objectives were to assess the perceived influence of multiple community (indigenous) and academic…

Numerous scholars have promoted "practitioner research" or "teacher-research" as a way of facilitating professional development for pre-service and in-service teachers, promoting change and reform in K-12 settings, and giving voice to teachers" personal and professional knowledge. In this article, the authors consider what…

This paper makes a contribution to the theory and practice of educational action research by introducing two theoretical and methodological resources as part of a personal review of sustained professional experience: "appreciative inquiry" and the "enneagram". It is more than a theoretical exercise, however, because it also…

In this article an educational action research study, based on a phenomenographic approach, is reported in which unexpected results have been possible to gather thanks to the inductive design of the study. The aim is to describe the ways in which contrasts of critical aspects of a learning object affect the students' generative learning found by…

PCI Education sought scientifically based evidence on the effectiveness of the "PCI Reading Program--Level One" for students with severe disabilities. During the 2007-2008 academic year. Empirical Education conducted a randomized control trial (RCT) in two Florida districts, Brevard and Miami-Dade County Public Schools. For this…

Background/Context: Despite recent gains from a number of students in U.S. schools, African American males continue to underachieve on most academic indices. Despite various interventions that have attempted to transform the perennial disenfranchisement, their school failure has persisted. Conversely, their failure in schools frequently results in…

The purpose of this study was to explore the use of action research as a framework to investigate cooperative learning and tactical games as instructional models in physical education (PE). The teacher/researcher taught a tennis unit using a combination of Cooperative Learning and Teaching Games for Understanding to three classes of boys aged…

This article draws on an action research project in primary and secondary schools which was funded through the Campaign for Learning, and supported by Newcastle University with a focus on "Learning to Learn". This is a potentially useful concept for teachers and academics as attempts are made to move beyond curriculum-driven and…

In this article we explore our experiences of researching children and families in the home setting. We trace the impact of the home setting on some ethical and methodological issues which arose in the course of conducting our field work and consider issues of consent, confidentiality, power, leaving the field and specifically our dilemmas, both…