While the great scientists of the past recognized a need for a multidisciplinary approach, today's schools often treat math and science as subjects separate from the rest. This not only creates a disinterest among students, but also a potential learning gap once students reach college and then graduate into the workforce. "Cases on…

This article provides a critical account of a selection of approaches that were used in the 26-month No Outsiders participatory action research project in education settings. The paper questions what challenges are presented to educators in critically exploring and challenging heteronormative sex-gender discourses. We revisit some of the tensions…

This study examined three main issues among 364 primary school children: (1) self-reported levels of perceived safety in classroom and playground, and relationship with teacher, (2) associations between perceived safety in the two contexts and peer reported levels of being bullied, and (3) if relationship with teacher moderated the associations…

This paper begins by considering some of the performative dilemmas associated with the enactment of children's rights by adults. In particular, it is argued that the mobilisation of children's rights often tends to involve multiple forms of "complexity reduction" (Osberg and Biesta, 2010), the net effect of which is to limit children's…

Background: Obesity prevalence is unusually high among adults with intellectual disability (ID). There is limited and conflicting evidence on obesity prevalence among ambulatory children and adolescents with ID. The present study aimed to estimate obesity prevalence in this group and to compare with population prevalence. Methods: Survey of nine…

Two intervention studies are described. Both were designed to study the effects of teaching children about the inverse relation between addition and subtraction. The interventions were successful with 8-year-old children in Study 1 and to a limited extent with 5-year-old children in Study 2. In Study 1 teaching children about inversion increased…

This paper focuses on the impact of peer mediation as a strategy for promoting social inclusion in primary school settings. Peer mediation constituted one of the interventions in the UK Government-sponsored On Track programme and evaluative data from this project are reported. The paper reports on trends in bullying and anti-social behaviour in…

The focus of research into the use of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) in the classroom has been largely in relation to teacher-pupil interaction, with very little consideration of its possible use as a tool for pupils' collaborative endeavour. This paper is based upon an ESRC-funded project, which considers how pupils use the interactive…

This paper considers the value of a specific non-punitive approach to dealing with bullying. It is based upon an exploratory project undertaken in a Year 3 class in a primary school which has not been identified by name. The project involved working with pupils involved in bullying using the stages and principles of the Support Group Method (SGM)…

There have been mixed results concerning any association between self-esteem and smoking prevalence in young people. The aim of this paper was to investigate cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships between self-esteem and the uptake of smoking in childhood, and how various sub-components of self-esteem are related to smoking. A sample of…

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is popularly understood to be a condition which resides in the person. In this scenario, the school is an innocent bystander, a container for the "maladjusted child". Drawing on an ethnographic case study of one classroom, the first stage of doctoral research into the production of the…

The research findings presented in this paper illustrate how the "value added" of schooling can be assessed empirically using cross-sectional data. Application of the regression-discontinuity approach within a multilevel framework produces both an estimate of the absolute effect of 1 year schooling and an estimate of the variation across…

The "MustLearnIT" European-funded research project with partners in Greece, Poland, Cyprus, Finland and the UK aimed to investigate ways of teaching and learning modern foreign languages (MFL) to early learners in small/remote primary schools where there were no specialist MFL teachers. This was to be carried out through new technologies…

We investigated for the first time the genetic and environmental aetiology behind scientific achievement in primary school children, with a special focus on possible aetiological differences for boys and girls. For a representative community sample of 2,602 twin pairs assessed at age nine years, scientific achievement in school was rated by…

It is known that the incidence of bullying reported by primary school children varies greatly between schools. It has also been shown that schools in which staff express a greater level of concern with managing the problem generally experience lower levels of bullying. This study examines the children's, rather than the teachers', views about the…