The nature of academic librarianship is changing as librarians move away from the curation of material and into research support roles. Although this creates new opportunities it can be difficult for staff to learn the skills needed. The Office of Scholarly Communication at Cambridge University seeks to address this issue with the Research Support…

The paper describes the importance of graphicacy as a key communication tool in our everyday lives. The need to better understand the development of graphicacy and its use in the school curriculum is emphasised. The need for a new research tool is explained and the development of a new taxonomy of graphicacy is described. The use of this tool…

Narratives and activity theory are useful as socially constructed data collection tools that allow a researcher access to the social, cultural and historical meanings that research participants place on events in their lives. This case study shows how these tools were used to promote reflection within a cultural-historical activity theoretically…

This article outlines the development of a tool designed to take forward the practice of science teachers through subject-specific guidance and discourse that promotes dialogue and deep critical reflection on practice.

This paper provides analytic focus on the productive and editorial contexts of children and young people's image-making, making visible its implications for the analysis of photographs. Drawing on participatory research in which children and young people worked alongside researchers to create a visual narrative of their lived experiences of…

Background: The primary-secondary transition can negatively affect pupils' emotional and psychological adjustment. However, methods for assessing concerns regarding secondary school are limited. A reliable and valid measure of transition-related concerns would be useful both in evaluating and shaping the content and delivery of universal and…

This article discusses how Assessing Pupils' Progress (APP) can be turned into more of a tool for formative assessment. It describes an approach called "APPREND" as a set of APP-based tools for formative assessment. The author provides a glimpse of how APPREND tools can help. (Contains 2 tables.)

This paper contains results of an empirical study that tested the efficacy and acceptability of two templates designed to fully involve students in proper and fair peer-assessments of their group project work (GPW) by providing concrete evidence of independent progressive documentation of their peers' contributions to the work-process and…

This brief research report gives an overview of a visually based methodology that has recently been used to shed light on situated decision-making in a high stakes educational assessment environment. Looking carefully at the feedback interactions taking place between senior and less senior examiners, the project aim was to gain insight into the…

In this article, we set out to explore what we describe as the use of video in various modalities. For us, modality is a synthesizing construct that draws together and differentiates between the notion of "video" both as a method and as a methodology. It encompasses the use of the term video as both product and process, and as a data…

As part of an exploratory study at three universities (two in the UK and one in the USA) of how first-year students in three disciplines (biology, electrical engineering and history) learn to argue, we conducted interviews (individual and group) with university faculty and students about the place of argument in their teaching and learning. Here…

This paper explores peer-to-peer teaching and learning at a postgraduate level using the example of two NVivo workshops run by geography postgraduate students. The workshops took place in March and May 2011 and feedback was collected from all attendees in both sessions. This paper aims to provide a practical guide to organizing and facilitating…

It has been argued by both educationalists and social researchers that visual methods are particularly appropriate for the investigation of people's experiences of the school environment. The current and expected building work taking place in British schools provides an opportunity for exploration of methods, as well as a need to establish ways to…

Purpose: The paper comprises an extended discussion of the possibilities that Web 2.0 applications offer to doctoral researchers, and where such applications fit in the early twenty-first century in the research environment. It explores the main issues associated with their use by doctoral researchers, and how these factors have influenced the…

This article addresses the under-theorization of visual techniques for social science research applications through the cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). The "problem" of "the visual" in research is given an ontological framing by highlighting the ways in which the use of visual techniques as research tools--designed…