High-quality preschool programs are heralded as effective policy solutions to promote low-income children's development and life-long wellbeing. Yet evaluations of recent preschool programs produce puzzling findings, including negative impacts, and divergent, weaker results than demonstration programs implemented in the 1960s and 70s. We provide…

Knowledges from academic and professional research-based institutions have long been valued over the organic intellectualism of those who are most affected by educational and social inequities. In contrast, participatory action research (PAR) projects are collective investigations that rely on indigenous knowledge, combined with the desire to take…

Poor literacy and numeracy levels in schools have raised questions in South Africa, as they have internationally, on the quality and appropriateness of initial teacher education for preparing teachers for the complexities faced in schools generally and for the mediation of literacy and numeracy in the early years in particular. This paper profiles…

Higher education had a predominant national and institutional focus for a long time. In Europe, supra-national political activities played a major role for increasing the interest in comparative research. Comparative perspectives are important in order to deconstruct the often national perspective of causal reasoning, for proving benchmarks, for…

In their 2005 "Harvard Business Review" article, Bennis and O'Toole described business schools as being "on the wrong track" as a result of their focus on so-called scientific research. Some commentators argue that business schools have slowly lost their relevance since the end of the 1950s when they undertook a major overhaul in response to the…

The mounting wealth of open and readily available information and the accelerated evolution of social, mobile and creative technologies call for a re-conceptualisation of the role of educators: from providers of knowledge to designers of learning. This call is reverberated by the rising trend of research in learning design (LD). Addressing this,…

Research and scholarship into educational effectiveness research (EER) is comprehensively reviewed from the UK, The Netherlands, the US, Cyprus, Belgium, Sweden, France, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, and other societies, dating from the field's origins in the 1970s. Issues include its history, methodological and theoretical advances, scientific…

In this article, the authors talk about the relevance of American political science and America. Political science has enormous strengths in its highly talented practitioners and sophisticated methods. However, its disconnection from its host society, while not so severe as for fields like English and sociology, nonetheless poses an existential…

Education researchers constantly bemoan teachers as resistant to implementing their findings. At the same time, teachers complain that education research is either too esoteric to be of any use in a real classroom or an exercise in proving the obvious. This persistent research-practice chasm is maintained by both the prosaic details of how and…

The role of school leadership in educational reform has reached the status of a truism, and led to major changes in school leader recruitment, selection, training and appraisal. While similar policy trends are evident in East Asia, the empirical knowledge base underlying these measures is distorted and lacking in validation. This paper begins by…

Most Australian Universities offer a selection of research-intensive pathways at the graduate level, which provides opportunities for independent inquiry and intellectual autonomy. Undergraduate students, however, are somewhat short-changed in their experience in research. They are exposed to a variety of areas and disciplines, which forms a…

Our current educational environment is subject to persistent calls for accountability, evidence-based practice, and data use for improvement, which largely take the form of performance metrics (PMs). This rapid proliferation of PMs has profoundly influenced the ways in which scholars and practitioners think about their own practices and the larger…

Advances in communication technology have created many new tools for school communicators--as well as increasing complexities for their programs. As a result, solid school communication research programs offering practical research insights for planning, tracking, and assessing school communication efforts are more important than ever. Still, many…

What keeps students interested and engaged in school? Unfortunately, in today's climate of increased rigor in classrooms, we are simultaneously losing sight of the need to provide students with an education that is both challenging and stimulating. In this paper, we discuss youth disengagement and offer suggestions to improve our overall knowledge…

The school-to-work (STW) transition occurs when young adults leave education and enter the full-time workforce. Most high school students in the United States will not graduate from a 4-year college and instead transition into the world of work, many filling positions in sales and service. Supporters of the STW movement advocate for educational…