This paper analyses the experience of a teacher and her Year 6 class (10-11 year-olds) over a school year, while participating in a pilot project introducing Personal Digital Assistants as a learning tool. The intervention was initiated and supported by the local City Learning Centre, which was concerned with how best to use technologies for…

This article provides a brief picture of social studies education in the United States, China, and South Korea. It begins with a brief account of the K-12 curriculum structure and history of social studies education in each country in the 20th century. It then turns to a contemporary look at the social studies, the national curriculum standards…

A team of secondary school language teachers and a teacher trainer developed a new method for Dutch writing instruction. The principles underlying the method were derived from insights regarding activating instruction and self-directed student learning. The development entailed two phases. In the first phase, the exploration of actual problems in…

The content of many school lessons is increasingly determined by the requirement to "cover" what is laid down in England's National Curriculum. In this situation transmission or "delivery" models of teaching all too often become the norm. This article records aspects of a very different kind of teaching and learning, and…

This article seeks to deepen understanding of the ways in which trainees account for and justify their practice. The area of particular interest to the authors is early years education where, in England at least, centrally issued governmental curriculum advice can be viewed as calling upon conflicting conceptions of education. The article reports…

Purpose: The aim of this study is to measure the effectiveness of the "Bug Investigators" pack in improving children's knowledge about micro-organisms, hygiene and antibiotics when it is used within the National Curriculum in junior schools. Design/methodology/approach: Teaching, using the "Bug Investigators" pack, was given by…

This study addresses educational reform in Ghana with reference to the junior secondary schooling. The empirical data on junior secondary teachers and pupils used here is taken from a larger case study of the junior secondary school innovation in Ghana. This offers some new perspectives on the realities of Ghanaian junior secondary schooling,…

In this article, findings from a recent one-year research project that investigated the use of games in a variety of school settings are described and discussed. The project involved four schools and 12 teachers designing classroom activities around specific games to support learners both within the formal national curriculum and in the context of…

This article analyzes the way English grammar is described in documents issued between 1998 and 2002 in England for the National Literacy Strategy (NLS) and for the lower secondary Key Stage 3 (KS3) National Strategy. The analysis reveals that the NLS and KS3 Strategy do not consistently follow a recognised approach to grammatical description, and…

This paper reports on the reality of classroom-based inquiry learning in science, from the perspectives of high school students and their teachers, under a national curriculum attempting to encourage authentic scientific inquiry (as practiced by scientists). A multiple case study approach was taken, utilising qualitative research methods of…

This paper explores how and to what extent digital multimodal text production can play a role in project work. The focus is upon describing and understanding how teachers and learners view multimodal text production as part of a learning process. Group-based project work has been used extensively in Norwegian schools since the 1970s. One criticism…

This second edition of "Learning in the Early Years 3-7" has been written to help early years practitioners understand and implement the U.K.'s new curriculum guidance document "The Foundation Stage". The author explains how to meet the requirements of the new Foundation Stage document and how these relate to the U.K.'s…

Considerable activity has occurred in the recent past regarding policy-making around Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in the school curriculum. Teaching about sustainable development involves complex and contested ethical and political issues. This case study research investigates how four student teachers taking part in a one-year…

Discusses what counts as understanding in primary school science (elementary school science) in the context of the United Kingdom's National Curriculum Order for Science. Considers the problems elementary school teachers face in pressing for understanding and suggests some ways to encourage teachers and enable them to support the construction of…

In this article the theme of individualisation of teaching is described and analysed. In the light of a fairly long tradition of a comprehensive school system embracing the idea of individualisation, we expected this to be an important aspect of ongoing changes in Nordic schools. Individualisation can be seen as continuity in the pedagogical…