Differentiated instruction has been shown to meet the needs of diverse learners, and can meaningfully improve individual student learning, however many teachers find it challenging to implement. This paper reports on a targeted professional development programme which was undertaken as a collaborative action research project. Results show many…

Practice-oriented educational research is renowned for its impact, both in educational practice and research. Yet, existing studies on the impact of practice-oriented educational research reflect a proliferation of ideas on what impact is, can or should be. This study aims to contribute to an in-depth understanding by establishing a theoretically…

The current study investigated factors that potentially influenced the pedagogic practices of 132 EFL teachers from 28 secondary schools in a large city in Poland. The teachers completed a questionnaire about the factors that impacted their teaching practices. The primary influences on teaching practices turned out to be the course textbook and…

In education, reform and renewal are constant. Policies are continually changing to meet the needs of the times and the society. Political advisors, such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, play an important role among private consultants as policy actors. According to Gunter's (in: Howlett and Mukerjee (eds), Handbook of…

There are growing expectations in Australia and internationally that school educators will engage with and use research to improve their practice. In order to support educators to respond to such expectations, there is a need to be able to accurately assess the levels of educators' research engagement. At present, however, few psychometrically…

Much cultural capital research has accumulated since its inception in the 1970s and researchers have charted the corresponding development of cultural capital theory in academic communities. This empirical study takes the further step of offering an account of cultural capital as it is interpreted in schools. This 'interventionalist account' is…

This article reports on a case study of Miho, a Japanese high school teacher, exploring her efforts to bridge research and practice in her use of motivational strategies. Drawing on Emirbayer and Mische's conceptualisation of agency and Connelly and Clandinin's theorisation on teachers' personal knowledge, the study examined how this language…

In some countries it is common for policy makers to advocate research use by practitioners as a means to bring about school development. Yet, despite their increasing sophistication, the enactment of protocols for using research is problematic and, even in optimal environments, practitioners have difficulty mobilising research findings to improve…

Cultures of performative accountability in education have been on the rise globally since the 1980s. Accordingly, teachers have increasingly been encouraged to understand their work in relation to particular forms of 'evidence'. All evidence, however, is not regarded as equal, and sources of evidence privileged within cultures of performative…

According to the literature, practitioners' use of research appears to play an important role in facilitating high-quality applied practice. Previous studies indicate that teachers have a positive attitude towards using research, but that they are rarely successful in implementing it in their actual practice. There appears to be a scarcity of…

Internationally, efforts are being made for educational practice to be research-informed on the grounds that schoolteachers will implement what research shows will "work". However, teachers do not necessarily accept research findings; sometimes they contest them. This article considers teachers' contestation in two empirical studies,…

This paper summarizes the results of a pan-Canadian online survey study that investigates the extent to which school practitioners (N = 1,153) use research to inform their practice. The self-reports indicate that the majority of the respondents used educational research, yet this engagement was infrequent. Although the respondents shared neutral…

Recent policy statements have urged greater use of research to guide teaching, with some commentators calling for a "revolution" in evidence-based practice. Scholarly literature suggests that research can influence policy and practice in "instrumental," "conceptual" or "strategic" ways. This paper analyses…

In the current article, we consider the influential position of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and discuss several methodological areas that demonstrate the need for caution when using and interpreting PISA results. We motivate our argument by briefly describing the program's increased influence in educational policy…

Background: There is worldwide interest in improving the effectiveness of teachers and teaching. This paper considers two strands of that interest. It revisits the impact of using enhanced feedback from teachers to pupils as a way of improving attainment, and it looks at the feasibility of teachers using research evidence to create their own…