Background: Animal-assisted Education (AAE), including Reading to Dogs (RTD), is an area of growing interest internationally across all phases of education, and increasingly considered an innovative approach to improving pupil outcomes. As creating RTD interventions necessitates a combination of expertise from the fields of education and…

Background: Prior to approaching any field site activity, the question of how researchers in education will interact with the participants in terms of positionality requires careful thought. Observation is often used by educators and researchers as a means of collecting informal data on children's development and learning in early childhood…

Background: The research interview is a valuable tool for collecting data in qualitative studies. All education researchers, whether novice or experienced, need to prepare carefully when planning to conduct interviews. Thus, how best to assist newer researchers to acquire interviewing skills for the purpose of collecting research data remains an…

Background: Internationally, teacher education usually involves close school-university cooperation. In Norway, such collaboration includes enabling student teachers to develop into researching teachers. In this article, our interest lies in how the Change Laboratory (CL), a form of participatory workshop, can lay the foundation for three-way…

Background: Concept maps have been used extensively for developing higher order thinking skills and are considered significant artefacts in constructing understanding in educational contexts. Increasingly, they are being used as a tool to chart a way towards 'new understanding' rather than recording 'accepted knowledge'. This study is set in an…

Background: This study focuses on furthering the understanding of doctoral researcher development, through the examination of significant events and application of the trajectories analysis framework. Conducting doctoral studies requires a high level of cognitive, personal and emotional competency. Students experience positive and negative…

Background: How can educators and students partner in the work of making transformational changes in schools and school systems? This paper will address how teacher researchers, funded by the Ontario Ministry of Education in Canada, have studied the student experience to generate evidence. It will outline changes in practice and benefits for…

Background: This paper considers the role of collaborative enquiry as a means of developing equity in education. The context was a collaborative project in which a university was supporting local schools in carrying out enquiry into their practice, with the purpose of moving the practice towards greater equity. Purpose: The research question…

Background: Approaches to conducting research with children afford them varying degrees of participatory power. Despite children's varying roles within research, more needs to be understood about the influences of unintentional power plays and, in particular, interactions between participant and non-participants on children's participation in…

Background: In many educational settings, professional development (PD) for in-service teachers assumes particular significance in the wake of curricula reform. This is so that teachers are enabled to become familiar with new competencies that are aligned with new learning standards, and also that teachers may be supported in actively reflecting…

Background: The growing interest among researchers concerning how to use assessment to enhance students' learning as well as to improve instruction provided the impetus for this review of teachers' assessment activities related to homework. Purpose and method: The purpose was to bring together and critically examine the evidence in a way that…

Background: Changing demographics in societies through international migration have led to an increasing number of bi-ethnic individuals. The focus of this study is on bi-ethnic students with one parent with an ethnic majority background and one parent with an ethnic minority background. Most studies worldwide have grouped these bi-ethnic students…

Background: Neuroscience is unlikely to produce findings for immediate application in the classroom. The educational significance and practical implications of knowledge about mind and brain inevitably require some level of interpretation, yet the multiplying examples of unscientific "brain-based" educational concepts suggest this process of…

Background: Over the past four decades there have been a number of controversies arising from the discussion of "equity" and "equality". These concepts are often invoked by policy analysts, policy-makers, government officials and scholars in order to justify or critique resource allocation to different levels of the educational system. Purpose: By…