The nurturing of learners' ways of knowing is vital for supporting their intellectual growth and their participation in democratic knowledge societies. This paper traces the development of two interrelated theoretical frameworks that describe the nature of learners' epistemic thinking and performance and how education can support epistemic growth:…

Recent discourse about the impact of university research has focused on "what" research impact is and less on "how" it manifests. To explore these two questions, we draw on knowledge theory and build on the distinction between explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge. We propose that tacit knowledge and knowing are necessary…

Use of theory within a field of research provides the foundation for designing effective research programs and establishing a deeper understanding of the results obtained. This, together with the emergence of domain-specific theory, is often taken as an indicator of the maturity of any research area. This article explores the development and…

Idealizations are omnipresent in science. However, to date, science education research has paid surprisingly little attention to the use of idealizations in fostering students' model competence and understanding of the nature of science (NOS). The starting point for the theoretical reflection in this paper is that insufficient consideration of…

Thinking about knowledge and knowing ("i.e.", epistemic cognition) is an important part of student learning and has implications for how they apply their knowledge in future courses, careers, and other aspects of their lives. Three classes of models have emerged from research on epistemic cognition: developmental models, dimensional…

This paper questions the idea that there are two opposing paradigms of educational research, often called positivist versus interpretivist. It argues that the 'paradigm' term has been used to avoid philosophical discussions about the nature of educational research. This has been done by understanding 'paradigms' to reflect metaphysical positions…

A conceptual confusion of "theory" exists in South African Open Distance and e-Learning (ODeL) research in which the concept is used with borderline, related, contrary, invented, or illegitimate concepts such as a model, approach, construct, hypothesis, theoretical framework, or conceptual framework. As a result, some researchers choose…

This article explores the nature of education as a vital part of human knowledge. The argument that is presented addresses the critique of education as having epistemological weaknesses as an academic discipline. The argument is framed by scholarship that has categorised the discipline of education as derived from three main traditions of…

In this article we set out to broaden the scope of comparative education in relation to change. Following what various scholars have already shown, we argue that the world we are exploring is contingent, as too is comparative research, reflecting particular epistemological perspectives. We use this dual focus on contingency and analyze the…

High Leverage Practices (HLPs), as a core set of teaching practices, represent important instructional priorities and provide instructional guidance for students' engagement in practice-based instruction. The goals of this research were to: (1) understand how an epistemic community (the people designing and leading courses and programs) viewed the…

The article draws attention to the forgotten ancestry of the "four steps of comparison" model (description--interpretation--juxtaposition--comparison). Comparativists largely attribute this to George Z. F. Bereday [1964. "Comparative Method in Education." New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston], but among German scholars, it is…

This paper tackles the issue of teacher researchers by offering a model for the design of teacher-led inquiries that meets both the theoretical and the practical requirements of scientific research in educational settings. Part 1 focuses on teachers' reluctance to undertake academic research during the course of their working year. Two practical…

This article focuses on the use of "paradigm" as a historiographical concept in art education research from the 1980s onward and examines what kind of understanding of time and history it has promoted. While Thomas Kuhn's paradigm theory has lost its relevance for the current historical research in art education, art educators still…

Since the 1950s in the USA and a bit later in Europe, researchers have started publishing results of systematic research on the learning of older adults. Some have also contributed to constructing theoretical definitions within this theme of research. The perception of older adults as potential learners is a widely shared paradigm. However, there…

The concept of research paradigm is one that many higher degree research students, and even early career researchers, find elusive to articulate, and challenging to apply in their research proposals. Adopting an ethnographic and hermeneutic methodology, the present paper draws upon our experiences as lecturers in Research Methods over many years,…