This study investigated differential effects of learning styles and learning orientation on sense of community and cognitive achievement in Web-based and lab-based university course formats. Students in the Web-based sections achieved higher scores at the "remember" and "understand" levels, but not at the "apply" or "analyze" levels. In terms of learning style, extrovert students outperformed introvert students in the lab-based sections, whereas...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Student Characteristics, Cognitive Style, Academic Achievement, Web Based...
This review provides a comprehensive examination of the literature surrounding the current state of K-12 distance education. The growth in K-12 distance education follows in the footsteps of expanded learning opportunities at all levels of public education and training in corporate environments. Implementation has been accomplished with a limited research base, often drawing from studies in adult distance education and policies adapted from traditional learning environments. This review of...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Elementary Secondary Education, Public Education, Distance Education, Literature...
This study was conducted on informal aspects of an inquiry-based physics course and reports findings about learning interactions and discourse observed during the first three semesters the course was offered. The course offered an alternative to the large lecture instruction typical in introductory university physics and promoted learning in an informal environment. The course organization attempted to engage students in investigations with only a small fraction of time devoted to...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Physics, Investigations, Informal Education, Problem Solving, Interaction Process...
This study brings together insights from research on teaching and learning in specific subjects, learning environments research, and effectiveness research, by linking teacher interpersonal behaviour to students' subject-related attitudes. Teaching was studied in terms of a model originating from clinical psychology that was adapted to education. Teacher interpersonal behaviour was analysed in terms of two, independent behaviour dimensions called Influence and Proximity. This study investigated...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Teacher Influence, Statistical Analysis, Proximity, Motivation, Educational Research,...
Computer-based technologies are now commonplace in classrooms, and the integration of these media into the teaching and learning of mathematics is supported by government policy in most developed countries. However, many questions about the impact of computer-based technologies on classroom mathematics learning remain unanswered, and debates about when and how they ought to be used continue. An increasing number of studies seek to identify the effects of technology usage on classroom learning,...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Public Policy, Mathematics Education, Developed Nations, Educational Research,...
The authors' goal in this paper is to initiate a dialogue among educators who continue to make assertions about the usefulness of identifying students' learning styles with little or no research support. They discuss the status of learning style instruction and the unsubstantiated claims made by authors of learning style instruments and by instructors. They explore a number of key questions: (1) Are learning style instruments valid and reliable?; (2) Do students benefit when the type of...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Teaching Methods, Cognitive Style, Measures (Individuals), Validity, Reliability,...
With this review, we explore the practices of arts-based educational research as documented in dissertations created and written over one decade in the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia. We compile and describe more than thirty dissertations across methodologies and methods of inquiry, and identify three pillars of arts-based practice--literary, visual, and performative. In this review, we trace the beginnings of a new stream of practice that is interwoven in some of these...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Foreign Countries, Educational Practices, Doctoral Dissertations, Educational...
This paper addresses issues in relation to recent criticism of teacher education, set in the broader context of political agitation for changes to the purposes, role and outcomes of education within society. The paper raises questions around the purpose of schooling and its role in modern societies and argues for the pedagogical importance of critical dialogue to a democratic conceptualisation of education and promotes the idea of professional education as democratic practice. (Contains 1...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Outcomes of Education, Professional Education, Preservice Teacher Education, Role of...
This paper takes up the question of the way in which "the problem with educational research" is represented. It takes as its point of departure two recent views on "the problem"--one expressed by an educational journalist and one presented by the Australian Council of Deans of Education. It locates these within a larger frame of international debate about educational research and its problems and considers how these arise out of particular dispositions towards educational...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Fantasy, Educational Research, Problem Solving, Disadvantaged, Research Problems,...
Academic engagement with higher education research policy in Australia, and with education policy more generally, is in crisis. This time around, it is not just that our theoretical tools are blunt and irrelevant (Ball 1990), so are our politics. It seems our attention has been so consumed by "what is policy" (Ball 1994a) and with challenging its claims to authority, that we have missed or ignored imperatives to engage with its production. Even though some have attempted...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Foreign Countries, Higher Education, Politics, Cooperation, Educational Research,...
In our descriptions of things, we normally think that truth plays an important part; we value true statements over false ones and we prefer people to be truthful rather than deceitful. If these two facets of truth are important in our everyday lives, they assume even more significance in educational research because of the commitment researchers make to the pursuit of truth. For much of the time, truth is not a pressing problem for educational researchers who just get on with the job. But on...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Researchers, Qualitative Research, Educational Research, Ethics, Foreign...
This paper presents an examination of the use of Rasch modelling in a major research project, "Improving Middle Years Mathematics and Science" (IMYMS). The project has generated both qualitative and quantitative data, with much of the qualitative data being ordinal in nature. Reporting the results of analyses for a range of audiences necessitates careful, well-designed report formats. Some useful new report formats based on Rasch modelling--the Modified Variable Map, the Ordinal Map,...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Mathematics Education, Item Response Theory, Classification, Mathematical Models,...
State and national accountability initiatives are forcing educational administrators to seek curricular interventions that will yield the greatest improvement in students' academic performance in the least amount of time. Though volumes of documentation regarding the value of the arts in education line the shelves of professional libraries and support for the arts as part of a comprehensive educational program is the subject of articles, speeches, and symposia, when push comes to shove, when...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Role of Education, Academic Achievement, Intelligence, Music Education, Dance...
Increasingly, educational reform is linked to the concept of professional learning communities (PLCs). Definitions of PLCs vary, but generally the concept refers to a group of educators who "continuously seek and share learning, and act on their learning" (Hord 1997, 6). Stoll and her colleagues, concluding their review of the current state of PLCs and research, observe that there is a "paucity of longitudinal research" and that "little is yet known about the potential...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Change, Educational Research, Educational Cooperation, Educational...
During the analysis of a survey of art therapy educators in 2001 (St. John, Kaiser, & Ball, 2004), issues of importance to art therapy and art therapy research education emerged. As a follow-up, the authors interviewed educators attending the 2002 Annual Conference of the American Art Therapy Association (AATA) to gain an understanding of their perspectives in three areas: emphasis on teaching qualitative and quantitative approaches, expected research competencies of graduates, and...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Statistical Analysis, Qualitative Research, Art Therapy, Educational Research,...
In this essay, the authors discuss what it might take to develop knowledge that can help education policymakers and schools attain their goals. In reading both the research and the current policy environment, the authors identify several fundamental reasons why it is so difficult to develop the knowledge needed to inform policies that might enable standards-based reform to succeed. First is an inadequate conception of the goal of the system and how proficiency should be measured. Second,...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Policy, Educational Research, Academic Standards, Educational Objectives,...
As a new reform in Australian education, middle schooling has been gaining momentum. The rationale behind middle schooling is to bridge the traditional primary-high school gap and provide a more developmentally appropriate educational experience for young adolescents. Middle schooling in the USA has gone through a "boom-to-bust" cycle and is currently undergoing a "reinvention" as research on practice and reporting of research on practice has, in the most part, been ad hoc...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Experience, Educational Change, Middle Schools, Foreign Countries,...
This paper explores various epistemological paradigms available to understand, interpret, and semiotically depict young people. These paradigms all draw upon a metadiscourse of developmental age and stage (e.g. Hall 1914) and then work from particular epistemological views of the world to cast young people in different lights. Using strategic essentialism (Spivak 1996), this paper offers four descriptions of existing paradigms, including biomedical (Erikson 1980), psychological (e.g. Piaget...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Preservice Teacher Education, Young Adults, Adolescents, Epistemology, Developmental...
Critics of Invitational Education and other self-concept approaches to learning have long argued that there is a lack of empirical data to support the claims that approaches to student instruction based on self-concept theory are central to effective learning. Ellis (2001) examines a number of these analyses where self-concept, self-esteem, and self-efficacy are derided as antecedents to successful learning. However, by examining the empirical research on classroom management, all of the...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Self Efficacy, Teacher Student Relationship, Classroom Techniques, Educational...
This study explores the following question: How do teacher candidates reflect on their learning about issues of diversity? As a novice teacher educator teaching a foundations course that foregrounds issues of diversity, power, and opportunity in schools and other social institutions, the author of this study set out to analyze how the students from her course who are pursuing teacher certification reflect upon their learning about diversity after completing this course. In this paper, she...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Preservice Teacher Education, Teacher Educators, Teacher Certification, Preservice...
This article presents an excerpt of a declaration from the United States Department of Education's "Strategic Plan: 2002-2007." The declaration signifies in no uncertain terms that the battle waged by critics of alternative research methods continues, and is likely to intensify. The denigration of research methods which decline to adhere to the trappings of logical positivism may have begun with Rene Descartes, but the origins of the dispute between positivists and post-positivists...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Strategic Planning, Rhetorical Criticism, Public Education, Educational Research,...
Bilingual education has been an extremely controversial and contentious topic in recent years among both educators and the general public in the United States. Long a bastion of what some writers have called "ideological monolingualism," the United States has not demonstrated either great sensitivity to or tolerance of linguistic diversity historically. In this article, the authors discuss the case for bilingual education programs, though, from a somewhat different perspective from...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Program Effectiveness, Educational Practices, Bilingualism, Bilingual Education...
This paper is an essay on the state of Australian education that frames new directions for educational research. It outlines three challenges faced by Australian educators: highly spatialised poverty with particularly strong mediating effects on primary school education; the need for intellectual and critical depth in pedagogy, with a focus in the upper primary and middle years; and the need to reinvent senior schooling to address emergent pathways from school to work and civic life. It offers...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Research, Interdisciplinary Approach, Social Sciences, Educational...
Educational research has been criticised by governments and practitioners. For some politicians and policy makers, there is a tendency to look for direct links between research and successful, effective and efficient practice. Research is needed to inform their evidence-based practice as policy makers, and to provide the kind of research teachers need to base their practice on the best available evidence for doing "x rather than y" (Hargreaves 1996) or predicting the "size of the...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Open Education, School Restructuring, Educational Research, Student Participation,...
Phelan (2000) has produced a complex bibliometric analysis of the international contribution of Australian educational research based upon publications and citations reported in the journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information--the Standard & Poors of the academic world. This paper examines Phelan's analysis, showing its strengths and weaknesses, as well as examining his proposal for the establishment of an Australian database along the lines of the ISI's index. (Contains 1...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Research, Periodicals, Bibliometrics, Citation Analysis, Foreign...
As my playful title suggests, I am referring to the process where the statement, "send reinforcements; we're going to advance," is said to have become, "send three- and fourpence; we're going to a dance." This quotation springs to mind when asked to think about how research gets picked up and recommendations from research are implemented in schools. This paper draws on the professional experiences of the author who has held a variety of roles in schools and the system and...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Research, Research Utilization, Theory Practice Relationship, Foreign...
In this paper I argue against a dominant view that social planning, supported by strategically located and tightly controlled research and development, is delivered from above and enacted downwards by the education system. As such the paper argues against a view taken by many theorists/politicians and reinforced by the major components of the educational bureaucracy. The Impact of Educational Research produces a warrant for an alternative form of thinking about the deeper forces of contemporary...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Social Planning, Research and Development, Teacher Characteristics, Educational...
This article is a response to "Mapping educational research and its impact on Australian schools," Chapter 2 of The Impact of Educational Research, in which researchers Allyson Holbrook, John Ainley, Sid Bourke, John Owen, Philip McKenzie, Sebastian Mission and Trevor Johnson report on their Commonwealth Education Department commissioned study. They mined the Australian Education Index and the Bibliography of Education Theses in Australia for patterns in education research in...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Research, Educational Improvement, Program Effectiveness, Foreign...
Chapter 5 of DETYA's volume "The Impact of Educational Research" (Selby-Smith 2000) begins with an examination of the peculiarity of decision making in the VET sector, followed by an examination of the idiosyncratic consequences for the function of research in the sector. Having established the distinctiveness of VET in relation to these two key factors (decision making and research), the chapter then proceeds to explore the linkages between them. The study on which the chapter is...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Research, Vocational Education, Theory Practice Relationship, Decision...
Since the publication of the Salamanca statement (UNESCO 1994), inclusive schooling has formed a growing part of the deliberations of the special education community. Inclusive schooling research in Australia in the main continues to reproduce traditions of the special education field, emphasising the dominant psychological perspectives that have been superimposed on inclusive education discourses. At the fifth International Congress of Special Education (ISEC 2000) held in Manchester,...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Mainstreaming, Regular and Special Education Relationship, Special Education, Student...
This paper examines the conflict in interest between teaching experiments and professional learning when they are combined in a research project. The study reported in this paper is the fourth year of a five year longitudinal study on the introduction of early algebraic concepts. The ten teacher participants are from five state primary schools in middle class areas in Brisbane, Queensland. The findings from this investigation suggest that potentially many conflicts exist between the interest of...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Algebra, Teaching Skills, Educational Research, Conflict of Interest, Longitudinal...
The notion of quality in undergraduate mathematics lectures is examined by using theoretical notions and research results from the literature and empirical data from a case study on lecturing on limits of functions. A systemic triangular model is found to catch critical quality aspects of a mathematics lecture, consisting of mathematical exposition, teacher immediacy, and general quality criteria for mathematics teaching. Mathematical exposition involves the dynamic interplay of mathematical...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Mathematics Instruction, Educational Quality, Lecture Method, Undergraduate Students,...
The National Research Center on the Gifted and Talented (NRC/GT) is funded by the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. This special issue of the Journal for the Education of the Gifted highlights a few of the research studies conducted from 1995-2000. These selected studies have a common thread as they all address teaching and learning from the perspective of changing behaviors, strategies, and practices. Each study is also responsive to our commitment to quantitative...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Research, Gifted, State Departments of Education, School Districts, Needs...
This article discusses meta-analysis in the context of research in gifted education. It provides the rationale for encouraging meta-analytic reviews, rather than narrative reviews, to synthesize the research in a given area. The article summarizes the results of reported meta-analyses retrieved from electronic databases and provides guidelines for conducting a meta-analysis and suggested resources for additional information.
Topics: ERIC Archive, Academically Gifted, Meta Analysis, Educational Research, Databases, Guidelines,...
The human capital emphasis in recent economic planning is leading to new pressures on the post-compulsory education sector where work-readiness is emerging as a major focus. With concerns about the impact of demographic change as the population ages, there is a renewed emphasis on greater productivity from and less wastage of human capital. Hence retention of young people in the education and training system to at least Year 12 and the development of explicit vocational pathways has become an...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Human Capital, Vocational Education, Education Work Relationship, Labor Force...
In this article, we focus on the role and actions of individual school leaders in initiating and governing the process of reculturing. First, we elaborate on the core elements of the process of reculturing, referring to a complex learning process of finding a new balance between cognitions and emotions both individually and collectively. We then review the literature for issues related to school leaders' roles and actions during reculturing. We argue that the role of leadership power largely...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Teacher Role, Educational Innovation, Instructional Leadership, Teaching Methods,...
The question of where special education students should be educated is not new. In this article, the author reviews research studies and research reviews that address this question. She argues that research evidence on the relative efficacy of one special education placement over another is scarce, methodologically flawed, and inconclusive. She also states that "Where should students with disabilities be educated?" is the wrong question to ask, that it is antithetical to the kind of...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Attitudes toward Disabilities, Disabilities, Special Education, Educational Research,...
Over the last decade, the field of early intervention/early childhood special education (EI/ECSE) has emerged as a primary service for infants and preschool children with disabilities and their families. Systems for providing early intervention for infants and toddlers exist in every state, and all state Departments of Education are responsible for special education for preschool children. In EI/ECSE, a unified theory of practice has emerged and draws from a range of psychological and...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Early Intervention, Educational Theories, Caregivers, Disabilities, Preschool...
To define what is special about the education of students with severe disabilities, this article provides a snapshot of research-based practices that are relevant to the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) focus on accountability. The NCLB requirement to assess all students in reading, math, and science is contrasted to the functional approach typical of skill acquisition research for this population. The concept of adequate yearly progress is addressed by reviewing the types of...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Strategies, Federal Legislation, Educational Improvement, Accountability,...
In 1997, the Illinois legislature passed House Bill 542 (Public Act 90-548) which changed teacher tenure requirements to a four-year, multi-tiered system that called for the accumulation of professional development credit for all teachers. The primary purpose of this study was to examine district responses to the 1997 legislation. To what degree, if any, did legislative requirements regarding the professional development of teachers affect the manner and means through which districts provided...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Faculty Development, Professional Development, Human Resources, State School District...
Research in science education has evolved rapidly over the past ten to twelve years due to the growth of two components of most published research. Though it might be argued that they are not really new, these two components are today necessarily explicit whereas they were more implicit in the past. As research has become increasingly qualitative and constructivist, the idea that describing precisely the theoretical base from which one's work grows has taken on much greater significance, thus...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Constructivism (Learning), Educational Research, Science Education, Rural Education,...
For decades the National Science Foundation has been funding the development of instructional materials whose design is based upon the recommendations of educational research. These recommendations include the idea that learning be sequenced and organized using an experiential learning cycle or an instructional model such as the Biological Science Curriculum Study (BSCS) 5E Instructional Model (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate). More recent research studies such as those...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Curriculum Development, Educational Research, Prior Learning, Experiential Learning,...
While multicultural education remains a work in progress, many of the cornerstones are already in place. Racism, classism, sexism, equity, and social justice issues feature as generative themes (Freire, 1970), which underpin this educational project. One area of research in multicultural teacher education that this article investigates is the way in which White students have sought to make meaning of their own Whiteness in the midst of a plethora of claims regarding the pervasiveness and...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Preservice Teacher Education, Preservice Teachers, Multicultural Education, Cultural...
As a Native American with advanced college training in the field of education in northwest lower Michigan, the author has increasingly encountered denial on the part of educational professionals in the region as a response to statistics on race. During 2002, she spent nine months reviewing and renewing her statistical sources for use in nonfiction essays and presentations. Those statistics that she has been able to renew have been consistent with sources she used a decade ago, indicating very...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Ethnic Groups, American Indians, Racial Integration, Case Studies, Etiology, Social...
This article examines the relationship between teacher effectiveness and students' achievement as measured by test scores. A strong belief among policymakers and public as well as private funding agencies is that test scores are directly related to the quality of teaching effectiveness. This relationship implies that there could be a direct causality among teacher preparation, teacher quality, and student achievement. The terms "teaching effectiveness" and "teacher effect"...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Teacher Effectiveness, Academic Achievement, Private Financial Support, Scores,...
This article describes research that explored student and teacher perceptions and management of conflict within the primary school context. It was found that both teachers and students shared similarities in their views of conflict and in their management of interpersonal problems at school. Conflict was generally perceived to be a negative phenomenon. In addition teachers and students commonly used a limited range of strategies, relying mostly on familiar and reactive conflict management...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Conflict, Conflict Resolution, Teacher Attitudes, Student Attitudes, Qualitative...
Using data from the reading component of the Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (N = 113,050), the effects of gender and curricular track for nine sub-scores of reading achievement were investigated. Only students indicating that they did not receive additional programming support were included in the analysis. Gender accounted for less than one per cent of variance in reading achievement. Gender differences for each curricular track were in the close-to-zero and small range. The results...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Females, Reading Achievement, Foreign Countries, Gender Differences, Males,...
A model for processes of abstraction, based on epistemic actions, has been proposed elsewhere. Here we apply this model to processes in which groups of individual students construct shared knowledge and consolidate it. The data emphasizes the interactive flow of knowledge from one student to the others in the group, until they reach a shared knowledge--a common basis of knowledge which allows them to continue the construction of further knowledge in the same topic together. (Contains 5...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Foreign Countries, Learning Processes, Probability, Epistemology, Cognitive...
This research project employs a historical methodology to analyze and characterize the growth of the knowledge base in gifted education following the U.S. Department of Education's (1993) report, "National Excellence: A Case for Developing America's Talent." Topical priorities and descriptors of inquiry are compared against the recommendations of the National Excellence report. During the 10-year period from 1994 to 2003, a disconnect is evidenced between recommendations and actual...
Topics: ERIC Archive, Educational Research, Academically Gifted, Research Needs, Gender Differences,...
Universities are funny places. They have a strong sense of hierarchy and rank. They have an amazing disparity in salary levels and status between staff, are class conscious, and are run by a large bureaucracy that oils and keeps the machinery going. They operate as educational institutions and yet also are entrepreneurial, marketing themselves in a competitive search for students and research resources. Most are in the public education sector but a few are private; they are closely scrutinized...
Topics: ERIC Archive, College Role, Activism, Institutional Characteristics, Social Justice, Public...