Teaching her Key Stage 3 students in Essex, Catherine McCrory was struck by the stark contrast between their enthusiasm for studying diverse histories of Africa and the Americas and their reluctance to engage with certain groups deemed different within England. Inspired by the resources in the local Record Office and keen to implement the part of…

The proposals for the revised National Curriculum in English suggest limiting the pre-twentieth century poetry that GCSE pupils read to "representative Romantic poetry" (Department for Education [DFE], 2013, p. 4). This paper argues that poetry of the early modern period is challenging and enriching study for adolescent pupils and that…

The content for the school science curriculum has always been an interplay or contest between the interests of a number of stakeholders, who have an interest in establishing it at a new level of schooling or in changing its current form. For most of its history, the interplay was dominated by the interests of academic scientists, but in the 1980s…

This paper analyses how the impact of international student achievement studies and the recent economic crisis in Europe are influencing the development of educational policy transfer and borrowing, from East to West. This is contrasted with education reform movements in East Asia, which have long legacies of borrowing from so-called…

This study aimed to examine the validity and reliability of an instrument designed to measure student perceptions of curricular goals in physical education, the Curricular Goals in Physical Education Questionnaire. Participants were 879 Finnish students from grades 7 to 9 (412 girls, 467 boys; mean age 13.81). An exploratory factor analysis was…

Research in language-in-education policy and planning (LEP) rarely examines how language teachers negotiate official policy statements on teaching methodologies. In this study, I investigate the current upper secondary school foreign language national curriculum in Japan that requires English classes to be conducted in English, implemented since…

This paper reports on the findings of a study that investigated formative assessment practices of Senior English teachers in the standards-based Queensland assessment system. This paper focuses in particular on the teachers' provision of feedback on rough draft summative assessment items. It identifies the links between assessment criteria and…

Informed understandings of nature of science and scientific inquiry are generally accepted goals of biology education. This article points out central features of scientific inquiry with relation to biology and the nature of science in general terms and focuses on the relationship of students' inquiry skills in biology and their beliefs on the…

This is a linear review of the education statutes of each state for the purpose of identifying those statutes which require the state's history to be taught in its K-12 schools, with further analysis for trends and outliers. The intent is to first serve as a benchmark as to where both each state and the nation as a whole is at this point in time.…

The formation of the Common Core State Standards can be regarded as the predecessor of a national curriculum. This research addresses how the proposed national math curriculum compares to the math curricula of a sample of peer-nations (Singapore, Netherlands, Germany, and Japan) with high student achievement rates in math, while relating the math…

Developing a conceptual understanding of elementary algebra has been the focus of a number of recent articles in this journal. Baroudi (2006) advocated problem solving to assist students' transition from arithmetic to algebra, and Shield (2008) described the use of meaningful contexts for developing the concept of function. Samson (2011, 2012)…

Why do we teach about the Holocaust and about other genocides? The Holocaust has been a compulsory part of the English National Curriculum since 1991; however, curriculum documents say little about why pupils should learn about the Holocaust or about what they should learn. Tamsin Leyman and Richard Harris decided to use the opportunity presented…

This article offers evidence from a classroom-based research study in English secondary schools which developed an innovative approach to teaching in Design and Technology based on inclusive design (also known as universal design). The research evidence highlights how creative, problem-solving approaches in Design and Technology can be used to…

The revised National Curriculum for Science for key stages 3 and 4 (ages 11-16) in England provides the opportunity to develop a new coherent approach to teaching about the carbon cycle, the use of carbon as a fuel and the resulting issues. The Earth Science Education Unit (ESEU) intends to develop a new workshop to support the teaching of this…

In Australia we are at a crossroads in science education. We have come from a long history of adopting international curricula, through to blending international and Australian developed materials, to the present which is a thoroughly unique Australian curriculum in science. This paper documents Australia's journey over the past 200 years, as we…