This case study describes an action research project aimed at improving the writing skills of disadvantaged background students and first-generation immigrants at the elementary-school level. This research was based on the hypothesis that poor writing skills may have negative effects on the academic outcomes for disadvantaged background students…

This case study presents a multistage and multimodal methodology for conducting online research studies using video conferencing tools. We designed our methodology to capture how Brazilian schoolchildren (ages 9-11) transact, alone or with others, homework information-searching routines. Our case study presents the steps involved in designing an…

This case study reflects on the use of photographic interviews as a research method to involve children, aged between 4 and 11 years, in an ethnographic research project that took place in an English primary school. There has been growing interest in the use of visual methods in ethnographic research in recent years. Photographs can provide…

Following the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand, I worked with five primary school communities on research to capture their earthquake stories. The aim was that we would co-design projects to create a permanent record of each school's experience. The projects took place over several years and led to different outcomes from an…

Gifted students who were in a fifth-grade telescoped math class during the 2013-2014 school year participated in an in-person qualitative research study regarding their identity development. During the 2019-2020 school year, these same students, who were now juniors and seniors in high school, were contacted to participate in a follow-up study.…

In this case study, I am discussing my recent PhD research project aiming to examine the development of spelling skills from different angles: the universality of dyslexia and the role of language in the developmental trajectories of spelling skills. To date, the number of studies comparing different types of spelling errors of children with and…

Increasingly, research on cognition, learning, and education seeks to understand the cognitive processes underlying conceptual understanding. This is especially true for efforts to understand how students learn science. The present case summarizes work that examines 6- to 10-year-old students engage in scientific reasoning to learn new scientific…

Children learn words at different rates. Some choose to learn words because it is fun, whereas others do not think learning words is fun and therefore struggle or just learn words to read. This Action Research study's purpose was to find out which types of students gained the most words during a 6-week intervention using an iPad sight word…

Tools to measure perceptions of child wellbeing using a questionnaire are commonplace in educational research. However, the design and development of these tools vary widely. This case study considers a new approach used by researchers who were part of a collaborative, mixed-methods study of child wellbeing, resulting in Australia's first…

This case study presents some of the practical aspects of focus-group interviews used in the frame of a broader research accomplished through Erasmus+ Project "Let's make it better! Raising the awareness of the triad nutrition-health-food safety in school education (EDU FOR HEALTH)." The interviews were conducted within the activity…

In August 1992, I began teaching elementary school in Pickering, Louisiana, to a class full of energetic fifth graders. I floundered my first few weeks, but quickly developed some effective skills. Over the next few years, I continued to hone my skills and began to notice there were differences in teachers in the various schools in which I worked.…

This case study sheds light on lessons learned from the perspective of a PhD candidate. Focusing on male primary teachers, this study explores how issues of masculinities are navigated and negotiated on a daily basis. Although limited research of masculinities has been conducted in educational contexts and settings in Ireland, previous studies…

Conversation Analysis uncovers features of talk-in-interaction during "real life" conversations. When these phenomena are repeatedly observed in the data, conclusions can be drawn regarding the function of the phenomena as elements of talk. In this project, we drew on a corpus of video-recordings collected in five different early…

The purpose of the study was to research good practices at three school levels--preschool, compulsory school, and secondary school--that contribute to the social and academic success of immigrant children and students. The project integrates four subthemes and main research areas, including children/students, teachers, leaders, and policy. We used…

This research project was carried as part of a doctoral thesis between 2009 and 2014. It aimed to answer a contemporary question about curriculum management in English primary schools, with a particular focus on history, and reflected contemporaneous policy initiatives and trends in curriculum management. The aims of the project were in-depth…