The economic benefits of staying on in education have been well established. But do students know this? One of the reasons why students might drop out of education too soon is because they are not well informed about the costs and benefits of staying on in education at an appropriate time of their educational career. Indeed, the fact that…

Today's classrooms are more diverse than ever. In fact, research shows that there will be a steady increase in Hispanic, Asian Americans, and African American students in the coming years. Therefore, differentiated instruction may be the panacea that educators are searching for. This paper commences with an introduction and then segways into a…

The aim of this study is to investigate how a community of practice focused on becoming a teacher of secondary school mathematics emerged during a pre-service teacher education programme and was sustained after students graduated and began their first year of full-time teaching in schools. Bulletin board discussions of one pre-service cohort are…

This article draws from a research project in 2007 with a small group of New Zealand outdoor educators. The purpose of the project was to examine teacher beliefs about outdoor education and explore the complex relationships between beliefs, values, and self-perceptions of pedagogical practice. Of specific interest was how theories of consistency…

Our paper reports findings from a two-phase deployment of iPod Touch and iPad devices in a large, urban Canadian school board. The purpose of the study was to gain an understanding of the infrastructure required to support handheld devices in classrooms; the opportunities and challenges teachers face as they begin to use handheld devices for…

Despite many worldwide physical education (PE) and physical activity policies targeting children in schools, there is considerable variation between policy and implementation. The purpose of this study was to investigate Victorian state secondary PE teachers' knowledge and implementation of the mandated policy of 100 minutes of PE and 100 minutes…

This article explores governors' perceptions of the role played by school principals in the democratic governance of secondary schools in South Africa. The South African Schools Act No. 84 of 1996 has mandated that all public schools in South Africa must have democratically elected school governing bodies, comprised of the principal (in his or her…

One of the challenges of providing students with disabilities access to the general education curriculum is their skill in using grade-level materials. Due to their expository nature and specialized vocabulary, textbooks in particular pose challenges for students. This article presents an activity that promotes familiarity with textbook structures…

This investigation focused on two research questions. The first question examined what specific instructional strategies for teaching vocabulary appear most frequently in current content area textbooks. The second question built on the first and used that information to develop a survey that was administered to secondary-level preservice teachers…

The main objective of this study was to gain knowledge as to how social passivity in school is related to the grades pupils achieve. The relation between social passivity and school grades received in eight different subjects, varying according to familiarity to teachers, demands of cooperation with peers and demands for public display of learning…

The author conducted research in Jordan, where he interviewed secondary school social studies teachers about their perspectives on teaching critical-thinking skills in their classrooms. All interviews were audiotaped or videotaped in Arabic and later translated into English. The author qualitatively analyzed data, including the translations of the…

Australia's national educational goals place considerable importance on the place of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in education. The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians of December 2008 asserted that "in this digital age young people need to be highly skilled in the use of ICT" (MCEETYA,…

Students' abilities to master the genres of science must include not only factual knowledge. They also have to negotiate what they want to achieve with their texts and their ideas about writing and themselves as writers and science students. In this article, classroom observations, text analysis and interviews are combined in a case study of two…

In response to the need for cross-nationally comparable evidence on student performance, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) launched the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 1997. PISA represents a commitment by governments to monitor the outcomes of education systems through measuring…

This study examined the perspectives of a sample of Appalachian middle and high school social studies teachers regarding the teaching of controversial current events. Specifically, the survey ascertained the teachers' familiarity with school district administrative policies regarding the teaching of controversial current events, their perceptions…