This paper draws on the experiences of 20 academic developers as they examine the proposition that the organisation and work of academic development in higher education is fragmented. Academic development was seen to have neither the status of a field nor a profession, and there was recognised tension between an institutionally focused service…

In March 2004, Stephen Ball and others presented a symposium at the conference of the British Educational Research Association (BERA) on the necessity of theory in educational research. Like Ball, I have observed that theory, not just social theory, is a difficult space and one that divides researchers (those comfortable with theory and those less…

The research into how students' attitudes affect their learning of science related subjects has been one of the core areas of interest by science educators. The development in science education records various attempts in measuring attitudes and determining the correlations between behavior, achievements, career aspirations, gender identity and…

The New Zealand Council for Educational Research's (NZCER's) Families and Communities Engagement (FACE) project is investigating ideas and practices involved in bringing together teachers, families, local communities and students to contribute to collective conversations and decisions about education. This report concerns a sub-project of FACE…

The Incredible Years parent training programme is a research-based therapy which aims to help families improve the behaviour of children with conduct difficulties in the early years, while the behaviour is malleable (Webster-Stratton & Reid, 2003). The short-term goals of the programme are to reduce conduct problems in children by increasing…

Health and social indicators that capture the distinct historical, social, and cultural contexts of Indigenous communities can play an important role in informing the planning and delivery of community interventions. There is currently considerable interest in cataloguing and vetting meaningful community-level health and social indicators that…

Informed by an amalgam of notions drawn from constructivist, socio-cultural, metacognitive and self-regulation theory, the discourse created to describe assessment to enhance learning has gone through a number of iterations or discursive shifts. As a result, the current discourse is both ambitious and complex with the roles and responsibilities…

This Teaching and Learning Initiative (TLRI) research project explored ways of teaching literature effectively in multicultural and multilingual classrooms. It involved primary and secondary school teacher-researchers working in partnership with university-based researchers over two years on a series of case studies, within an action research…

This article discusses six teaching strategies identified by teacher-researchers as supporting their goal to improve learning and teaching for all children in the intercultural setting of a kindergarten in "Aotearoa" New Zealand. As a Centre of Innovation, the kindergarten received government funding for a 3-year action research project…

Laboratory work is one of the main forms of teaching used in chemistry, physics, biology and medicine. For many years researchers and teachers have argued in favor of or against this form of education. Student opinion could be a valuable tool for teachers to demonstrate the validity of such expensive and work intensive forms of education as…

An educational researcher describes and reflects on a qualitative research project she conducted, focusing on her positioning, neutrality, and objectivity throughout the research process and during subsequent data analysis. The research took place in a K-12 school in a remote rural New Zealand community inhabited by Maori, 1970s…

Sponsored by the New Zealand Ministry of Education, the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative has sought to develop teachers' research capability and to build knowledge about teaching and learning with the intention of improving outcomes for learners. Fortunate to receive a two-year grant, our research collaboration investigated secondary…

Following a review of assistance provision to New Zealand small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in 1998, the government established the BIZ programme. The purpose of the new initiative was to build management capability amongst SMEs by providing them with free access to a business needs assessment, followed by training and seminars, one-on-one…

This study investigates the information-seeking behavior of fourteen ethnomusicologists in New Zealand via interviews. The findings shed light on what information ethnomusicologists seek, the sources and services they use, and the barriers they face in information seeking and use. A number of ways in which libraries can create collections and…

This book explores the wide range of contexts in which research into creating connections in learning and teaching may take place. Creating connections can encompass making links, crossing divides, forming relationships, building frameworks, and generating new knowledge. The cognitive, cultural, social, emotional and/or physical aspects of…