Dr Mahmoud M. S. Abdallah's article, "The New Territory of Educational Research in TESOL/TEFL: What Novice Researchers Should Know", provides a comprehensive guide for novice researchers in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). It emphasises the importance of research…

Catalonia has a long tradition of school innovation movements. These have increased in recent years as public administration and private entities have initiated substantial school reforms oriented toward the use of evidence in teaching practice. As the Catalan education system is highly autonomous, not all schools have embraced the…

Despite its growing popularity, the thesis by publication is a less conventional format for doctoral dissertations in the field of education. The author successfully undertook a thesis by publication in education from 2012, to submission in 2014. This paper draws on both the literature in the field and the experiences of the author through an…

Three issues emanating from the Bulterman-Bos article (2008) form the core of this commentary. First, the issue of relevancy is addressed from the standpoint of action research and other forms of practitioner inquiry. From this perspective, the divisions between the cultures of university and school are addressed both ways: Each can potentially be…

Purposes and methods of attracting articles on educational research to the Journal of Teacher Education are discussed. Three research-oriented formats are introduced that will appear in future issues: (1) Teacher Education Research Commentaries; (2) Research Briefs; and (3) research articles. (FG)

The movement of research findings from the university to the public school has historically been slow. A random sample of educational researchers and school superintendents were surveyed to determine (1) how superintendents and educational researchers actually perceive responsibility for implementation of research findings, and (2) if the results…

Reforms of educational practice arise from attractiveness of new ideas rather than from research findings because researchers import frameworks from other disciplines rather than using actual classroom phenomena as a basis for conceptual apparatuses and methods. (JW)

In this address before the American Educational Research Association, the director of the National Institute of Education discusses the leadership role of that agency in educational improvement and emphasizes the importance of cooperation between research and practice communities, between administrators and policymakers, and among federal, state,…

Over the last 20 years there has been a surge of activity in research on teaching. Researchers and teacher educators have also debated the merits of this research for teachers in terms of its value and the ways research can influence practice. Controversy continues about the kind and degree of influence research can have on teachers and teacher…

In a survey of educational researchers, school and district administrators, and policymakers, 1,818 respondents rated educational practices and policies according to their influence on learning and assessability. Classroom practices, design and delivery of curriculum, and schoolwide practices were rated as more influential than federal, state, and…

The process of education will be fully understood only by studying it as a process, as a few anthropologists and sociologists have begun to do. The problems of inner city education need more such studies, especially longitudinal investigations of the processes by which exceptional teachers and schools succeed in the education of impoverished…

Selected issues in educational research and development are discussed as they relate to local educational agencies and institutions of higher education. Local education agencies are defined as public supported schools (elementary, middle/jr. high and high schools) and institutions of higher education as state supported colleges and universities…

The dilemmas faced by the educational research community generally raise important implications for the new National Institute of Education. Pressing social problems require immediate solution, however, demands for immediate results in the complex problem areas of education may lead to incompletely conceived programs and sloppy scholarship.…

Staff members of a state literary resource center surveyed their practitioner clients to determine how they viewed research and the kinds of uses they made of it. Mail surveys were sent to all of the 404 adult education and English as a second language program directors in the state, and followup telephone interviews were conducted with 16 of the…

Differing attitudes of researchers and preschool teachers towards research in early childhood are discussed in this paper. These differences are seen as arising from causes such as the special training of each group and the nature of the work they do, the distribution of the sexes in each group and the social institutions which back them. The…