In order to ascertain which school characteristics can explain the differences in effectiveness between schools, important methodological choices have to be made in school effectiveness research. One of these choices relates to the criterion or criteria the researcher wishes to use to compare schools. Should, for example, a school be deemed…

Transnational higher education (TNHE) development is not an entirely new international activity in the education services sector. The nature and scale of the global expansion of contemporary TNHE developments are, however, changing substantially. An understanding of this growth is currently largely lacking because of a dearth of comprehensive…

Current international demands to strengthen the teaching profession have led to an increased development and use of professional content standards. The study aims to provide insight in the construct validity of content standards by researching experts' underlying assumptions and preferences when participating in a delphi method. In three rounds 21…

Purpose: The overall purpose of the European Union-funded Leadership Improvement for Student Achievement (LISA) project was to explore how leadership styles, as conceptualized in the developed dynamic holistic leadership framework, directly or indirectly affect student achievement at the lower secondary level of education in seven European…

This article describes and reflects our experiences as researchers in a design-based research project on a curriculum innovation focused on meaningful, co-operative learning in vocational education in the Netherlands. The project was successful in gaining insights in possible practices for workplace learning but did only partly realize the…

The project "The educational value of various aspects of multilingualism in the classroom of the Basque Country and of Friesland" concerns a comparative study of the languages in the schools in the Basque Autonomous Community and in the Province of Friesland. It is part of the agreement between the general administration of the Basque…

In the literature on intercultural education there is an abundance of text about what ought to be going on in the classroom and a lack of empirical descriptions of the dilemmas of intercultural education in practice. This article describes the practice of five teachers guiding discussions about sensitive issues in ethnically diverse secondary…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to offer a comparison of how human expertise is perceived by human resource development (HRD) scholars across several Western European countries and in the USA. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative, exploratory approach using electronic mail was used for this study. In total, 36 leading HRD scholars from…

Background: Since the 1990s, people with intellectual disability (ID) in the Netherlands have been moving from institutions to supported accommodation in the community. The Government is in need of recent data on the numbers of these people, to ensure adequate care provision and funding. This paper reports on the prevalence of people with ID in…

This article discusses large-scale assessment of change in student achievement and takes the study by Hickendorff, Heiser, Van Putten, and Verhelst (2009) as an example. This study compared the achievement of students in the Netherlands in 1997 and 2004 on written division problems. Based on this comparison, they claim that there is a performance…

As part of the Teacher Education Research and Development Programme (TEP), a project focusing on "Stimulation of practice-based teacher education research", was undertaken by Dr. Roger Deacon and Dr. Ben Parker, in conjunction with the Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD). As part of the project, a set of research guidelines…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present the key project learning points and outcomes as a guideline for the future quality management of demand-led learning and development. Design/methodology/approach: The research methodology was based upon a corporate university blueprint architecture and browser toolkit developed by a member of the…

Fikkert (1994) analyzed a large corpus of Dutch children's early language production, and found that they often add targetless syllables to their words in order to create bisyllabic feet. In this note we point out a methodological problem with that analysis: in an important number of cases, epenthetic vowels occur at places where grammatical…

Training in scientific research methods and skills is a vital part of Dutch specialist training in intellectual disability medicine. The authors evaluated results of such training at one Dutch university medical facility that had an obligatory research program involving projects conducted by the physicians-in-training (topics, teamwork, acquired…

The last decade identity is often and very fruitfully conceptualized as "narrative identity." Neither for individuals nor for groups is identity a given beforehand anymore. On the contrary, identity has to be constructed in an inductive way continuously. Three qualitative research methods are applied to explore in an inductive way the…