National identities have been challenged by European integration, globalisation, migration and regionalisation. More recently, there has been a resurgence of nationhood and national identity which begs the question how education systems, and curricula in particular, are responding to this. This article explores how national identity is reflected…

This systematic review investigates the relevance of general pedagogical knowledge for successful teaching. It synthesises the empirical evidence of 10 769 teaching professionals and 853 452 students from primary to tertiary education in 21 countries. The meta-analysis of 20 quantitative studies revealed significant effects for teaching quality…

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an important cross-national study of 15-year-olds' academic knowledge and skills. Educationalists and public policymakers eagerly await the tri-annual results, with particular interest in whether their country has moved up or slid down the international rankings, as compared to earlier…

This article explores how school-based counselling might impact young people's capacity to study and learn. Previous research has indicated that counselling in schools has an indirect positive impact on academic achievement. A mixed methods approach, using a semi-structured qualitative interview and a brief rating scale, was employed with 21 young…

This research set out to explore how young people could contribute to sexual health curriculum development, in order to increase the relevance of such curricula to school children. The aim was to facilitate young Irish people, through a participatory research methodology, to generate, collate and present their views on effective sex education.…

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to examine the perceptions and attitudes towards enterprise education at secondary level in Ireland from a multi-stakeholder perspective. The key stakeholders involved in enterprise education are teachers, principals, pupils and parents. The examination encompassed profiling the Irish educational system and the…

Over the last two decades there has been an increase in the use of qualitative research, particularly in the human sciences. Such a move has resulted in an increasing number of researchers across disciplines using various types of qualitative software specially designed for managing text and facilitating analysis of qualitative data. However, we…

This paper describes, by focusing on factor analytic structures, pupils' reactions towards the utilisation and preservation of nature. A previously hypothesised model based on these two domains (comprised of 5 primary factors) was shown to be valid for four different Western European pupil samples: CH, D, DK, IRL. The empirical basis of this…