The Educational Doctorate (EdD) at the University of Wolverhampton offers educational practitioners the opportunity to design a research enquiry based in, on or around their professional work. The cohort, reported on here, embarked upon their EdD studies during the 2007/08 academic year. This study reports on seven participants' learning…

Web-enabled technology is now being applied on a large scale. In this paper we look at open access provision of teaching and learning leading to many users with varying patterns and motivations for use. This has provided us with a research challenge to find methods that help us understand and explain such initiatives. We describe ways to model the…

This article offers a descriptive and analytical account of the current state of educational research in Scotland, viewed against the background of constitutional change within the United Kingdom and debates about the nature, function and quality of research activity and output. It starts by considering how to undertake the task in hand and argues…

Purpose: The feasibility of a community-level drug prevention intervention based upon the principles of motivational interviewing within a further education college was investigated in a pilot study. Design/methodology/approach: The implementation over the course of a single term of "Let's Talk about Drugs" was studied with both action…

Data from current study suggest adolescents worry about what other people think because there are real personal and social consequences. Such concerns are seen as being based in social reality and are not imaginary as suggested by Elkind. Advocates new methodologies which place young people at the center of analysis. (Contains 34 references.)…

This article draws on the author's experience as Director of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), the UK's largest coordinated educational research initiative, to review some recent developments in the field and, in particular, some major contemporary challenges. In response to critiques of educational research of the late 1990s,…

This paper reports on a collaborative project to improve assessment undertaken by a cross-discipline group of university lecturers (Business, Engineering and Psychology) using action research methodology. First-stage analysis was based on results from an Assessment Experience Questionnaire developed by the FAST FDTL4 (Formative Assessment in…

Guidance and legislation in the UK suggest that it is becoming increasingly important to listen to the voices of pupils, to acknowledge their rights and to consult and collaborate with them in the development of personalised approaches to their education. In this article, Jackie Ravet, lecturer in inclusive practice at the University of Aberdeen,…

An empirical investigation of international research relating to special educational needs is reported. Two international arenas were identified: a North American and a British/European. Articles from 2004 were analysed with regard to 1) sex of authors, 2) country of institutional affiliation of authors, 3) themes and 4) perspectives. The analyses…

In this article, we argue that educational technology research has spent too long trapped in a paradigm of simplistic comparisons, wherein normal science consists of evaluating a technology-based intervention by contrasting it with some established set of educational practices. Our argument is different in significant ways from the claim that…

Powerful, dominant discourses surrounding neo-Hahnian theory (as discussed by Brookes in 2003) and effectiveness (as discussed by Hargreaves and Fullan in 1998, for example) have influenced both practice and research in outdoor adventure education. This has led to a concentration of research that focuses on the impact of outdoor programmes. It has…

This paper reports on a commissioned research project to evaluate the impact of support (mainly funding) given by the UK Government's National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) to various projects under the general heading of "science learning" over a four-year period (2000-2004). Findings emerging from the study…

The paper examines aspects of the relationship between teaching and research in higher education in social science research methods, with particular reference to the subject area of Education. There are three main themes: reflections on how social science research methods should be (or are) taught; a review of current debates about the…

Practitioner involvement in evaluation, research, development, and other forms of disciplined inquiry that are small scale, local, grounded, and carried out by professionals who directly deliver those services is embraced across a wide range of professions as essential to good professional practice. However, little is known about the character,…

In this paper we argue that for the secondary analysis of qualitative data to be effective researchers also need to subject any accompanying interviewer notes to the same secondary analysis process. The secondary analysis of interviewer notes can provide a great deal of insight into the research process and the attitudes, experiences and…