Traditionally school teachers have been considered as lacking knowledge of their own. They were regarded as consumers of knowledge created by university researchers outside their practice. With the increasing call for teachers to assume a role as researcher in recent China, more and more research has been conducted into the knowledge of school…

The teacher research movement in Chile has, historically, been an expression of the profession's concerns with the ways in which schooling reproduces and produces the social order in the broader society. The work currently done by members of the union's Pedagogical Movement is described, showing the connections between the scope of problems…

This qualitative action research study examined teachers' perceptions of leadership, research-based practices, and experience. I investigated how these three factors influenced the culture and change process at one suburban high school in order to better understand the context and to ultimately use the knowledge gained to improve the culture…

This article reports on research initiated by the trade union for lecturers and researchers in the UK, the University and College Union (UCU), which examined the pressures, concerns and positive aspects of being a member of research staff at one UK university. The findings are presented from the premise that university researchers are caught…

Social psychologists are persuaded that researchers as well as laymen tend to overestimate the influence of personal traits and underestimate the influence of situations on observed behavior. The author of this article suggests that education researchers and policy makers may be overestimating the role of personal qualities in their quest to…

For the past two centuries, western modern education has informed education policies and practices in Egypt. However, few researchers have analyzed the historical or current politics of educational transfer in this country. This article investigates the ways in which foreign transfer has influenced Egyptian education, both historically and…

Written as four scenes that span a five-year period, this article examines the summative evaluation of an organized school reform programme in the United States from the teacher perspective. The study provides fine-grained details of how the evaluation of the particular reform effort went "awry" in the view of some teachers who directly…

Researchers for this multisite quantitative study examined the relationships between teacher perceptions of the extent of teacher leadership in a school and the grade level, degree level, and leadership status of the respondents. Data for this study were collected in two administrations in 43 schools in seven U.S. states. To test for differences…

During the past two decades, Chris Confer and Marco Ramirez have worked to deepen and improve mathematics instruction at schools around the country. Wherever they go, they find the raw ingredients for success already present: "The potential for positive change lies within each school. Abundance is present in the form of capable children,…

In 2009, the federal government committed over $3 billion nationwide to help states and districts turn around their worst-performing schools. The U.S. Department of Education intended for the School Improvement Grants (SIGs) to spur dramatic change. This report looks at the results of a field study of the first-year implementation of those grants…

Scientific inquiry involves a variety of abilities scientists use to investigate the natural world. In order to develop students' scientific inquiry, researchers and educators have developed different curricula and a variety of instructional resources, which make features and descriptors of scientific inquiry in teaching and learning even more…

Despite years of controversy about what counts as rigorous educational research and significant amounts of taxpayers' support for related reform of U.S. public schools, serious inequities in U.S. K-12 education remain. The authors of this essay bring the perspectives of two tenured university teacher educators who share a background of over 40…

How do researchers and practitioners understand and interrogate education reform when it is heralded as the solution to many problems, not all of which are educational? As importantly, how can applied educational researchers delve "beneath the skin" of "given" problems to solve or report, and suggest a range of explanations? In…

This paper investigates the history and concept of liberalism from its first uses to its most modern incarnations. The paper aims to serve as a primer for educators and educational researchers to better understand liberalism and its place as a foundational and controversial discourse in politics, social science, and education. Through reference to…

With local lumber mills shutting down, Robert Kenning, an instructor at Salish Kootenai College in western Montana, and the tribe's forestry director, came up with an idea. Kenning landed a $200,000 Department of Agriculture grant in 2010 to explore the possibility of turning logging scraps and smaller trees into chips or pellets that could be…