For decades, teacher research, as one form of action research, has been a research methodology that combines theory, practice and improvement of practices in classrooms. However, the lack of teacher autonomy and trust in their professionalism reduces teachers' opportunities to conduct teacher research in their classrooms in many countries. Based…

This article studies issues of coloniality in so-called capacity-building projects between universities in Africa and Scandinavia. Even fifty years after independence, the African higher education landscape is a product of the colonial powers and subsequent uneven power relations, as argued by a number of researchers. The uneven geography and…

The purpose of this study was to investigate children's self- and social perceptions of success to identify how success could be promoted in a classroom context. Using a participatory approach, this study explored children's subjective experiences with success in 41 learning situations selected by researchers (Phase 1: self-perceptions) and 48…

The aim of this paper is to discuss the role of coding and observation manuals in classroom studies. While observation manuals have been a part of the methodological toolkit for measuring various aspects of instruction for decades, the field has also been suffering from "paradigm wars," fragmentation and local production of instruments.…

The present study focuses on examining how digitally guided conceptual mapping can be used in orienting students in higher education to learn complex domain content and practices. The outcomes of conceptual mapping were investigated as the orienting bases created by the students that used digitalized conceptual tools to construct an external…

Visual program simulation (VPS) is a new, interactive form of educational program visualisation, in which learners use graphical controls to direct a program's execution rather than simply watching an animation of it. In this article, we report on a qualitative empirical study of novice programmers learning through VPS. From an analysis of…

Unlike other disciplines in the social sciences, there has been relatively little attention paid to the structure of the undergraduate political science curriculum. This article reports the results of a representative survey of 200 political science programs in the United States, examining requirements for quantitative methods, research methods,…

The "tribes and territories" metaphor for the cultures of academic disciplines and their roots in different knowledge characteristics has been used by those interested in university life and work since the early 1990s. This book draws together research, data and theory to show how higher education has gone through major change since then…

Papers from the proceedings of the 14th Annual Conference of the Bulgarian Comparative Education Society was submitted in two volumes. Volume 1 contains papers submitted at the conference held in Sofia, Bulgaria, June 14-17, 2016. Volume 2 contains papers submitted at the 4th International Partner Conference of the International Research Centre…

This article reports methodological aspects of a research study on the reasoning of teachers. The aim is to describe and evaluate the use of the stimulated recall method (STR) when information and communication technologies (ICTs) are involved in terms of educational settings and therefore in the research setting as well. First, we introduce the…

In this article we will present a reflexive way of producing a narrative analysis on teaching and learning that involves all participants of the pedagogical process. Our theoretical contribution rests on the concept "lived pedagogy", adapted from Max van Manen's term "lived experience". Like van Manen, we start by asking the…

This study explored university students' views of whether they will need research skills in their future work in relation to their approaches to learning, situational orientations on a learning situation of quantitative methods, and difficulties experienced in quantitative research courses. Education and psychology students in both Finland (N =…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate teachers' attitudes towards medicines and to determine what they are willing to teach children about medicines. This study is part of a larger project where medicine education materials accessible on the internet (www.uku.filaakekasvatus, in Finnish with English introduction) were designed,…

This report considers the research conducted in Finland on photocopying and how it relates to teaching methods, and attempts to develop a theoretical basis for evaluating such research. In the first part of the report, it is argued that studies of copying need to target four separate areas of concern--knowledge, attitudes, activity (quantitative…

This article presents the methodology used by the Finnish Education Evaluation Council in the national evaluation of social and communication skills in vocational education and training. The evaluation concentrates on key competences such as learning-to-learn skills, communication skills, social skills and entrepreneurship (Implementation of…