This article explores the link between the OECD TALIS 2013 survey's framework for defining the ideal teacher and national educational goals by focusing on the teacher self-efficacy items, using cross-country comparisons. Surprisingly, cross-country analysis of the TALIS 2013 data combined with World Value Survey data about Desired Child Qualities…

This empirical study investigates factors that influence the implementation of science inquiry in the education systems of Turkey, Israel, Sweden and the Czech Republic. Data was collected by means of recordings of science experts' discussions as part of an EU-funded project called Science-Teacher Education Advanced Methods (2009-2012). Results of…

This paper arose out of a shared concern about how to explore young children's ways of becoming-writers. A framework based on the nomad thought of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari was used to develop the analysis. A situated, relational and nomadic analysis offers insights into how processes of becoming-writers are produced,…

We tested the peer-socialization/contextual-amplification explanation for the link between early female puberty and problem behaviour. We propose that in cultures with high tolerance for adolescent heterosexual involvement, early puberty should be linked with problem behaviour--not in other cultures. We compared girls in two cultures (Slovakia and…

This study explored the question of whether a relationship exists between the Nordic cultural idea of friluftsliv and the psychological construct of environmental connectedness (EC). This quantitative study employed a correlational design with existing data from the Swedish Outdoor Recreation in Change national survey. Results indicate that there…

The modernisation process of universities has historically highlighted the necessity of providing support structures to facilitate contacts and relationships between research groups and the outside environment, with the objective of increasing the quantity and improving the quality of collaborative research activity. The first steps in this…

The purpose of this study was to examine similarities and differences in perspectives of fathering among American, Chinese, Japanese and Swedish in-service and pre-service early childhood teachers. The participants in the quantitative survey consisted of 67 American in-service and 277 pre-service teachers, 118 Chinese in-service and 163…

The purpose of this investigation was to examine, from a cross-cultural perspective, students' epistemological patterns of reasoning about socioscientific issues (SSI), and to identify potential interactions of cultural and scientific identity. Mediating factors associated with students' argumentation and discourse about SSI, as well as the…

Drawings are often used to obtain an idea of children's conceptions. Doing so takes for granted an unambiguous relation between conceptions and their representations in drawings. This study was undertaken to gain knowledge of the relation between children's conceptions and their representation of these conceptions in drawings. A theory of…

Introducing findings from the 2004 Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE), this research complements the large number of recent U.S. studies on the role of grandparents in caring for their grandchildren. For 10 continental European countries, the authors investigate cross-national variations in grandparent-provided child care…