Recent research suggests that Muslim boys have become the "New Folk Devils" of British education, who are characterised by resistance to formal education, especially at secondary level, and under-achievement. Since the 1990s, British Muslim boys would appear to have become increasingly alienated from compulsory schooling, especially in…

This research study was conducted to address pre-service physics teachers' assessment literacy and its implementation into practice. The research was both quantitative and qualitative in nature. For the quantitative aspect of the study, the researchers determined the participants' assessment literacy after their enrolment with the…

Any policy reform in education is highly effective when it is planned and implemented "holistically" and yet, it is the most challenging way forward. Many countries in Asia have reformed their English language policies and syllabi in the last two decades due to the increasing value of the language worldwide. Motivated by a…

In this paper the idea of social entitlement to conceptual knowledge is considered in relation to students' views of music at secondary school in New Zealand. The data was collected as a means of triangulating the key focus of a study concerning the beliefs and actions of teachers in relation to curriculum. In interpreting the student data I…

The question of where to locate teaching about the relationships between science and religion has produced a long-running debate. Currently, science and religious education (RE) are statutory subjects in England and are taught in secondary schools by different teachers. This paper reports on an interview study in which 16 teachers gave their…

Research has shown that how principles and tools related to Assessment for Learning (AfL) are taken up by teachers can significantly impact how assessment initiatives are realised. However, questions remain about how teachers develop new resources for use in local contexts, and what these processes entail. This article examines such processes in…

The present study investigates English language teaching (ELT) curriculum planning in Iran's Ministry of Education and its implementation by teachers. We studied programme evaluation; needs analysis; the ELT-specific documents; communication channels between planning and practice levels; teacher evaluation and student assessment;…

The General Certificate of Education (GCE) A* grade was first awarded to students in 2010. It was introduced to assist higher education institutions in differentiating between the highest performing students and to promote and reward greater stretch and challenge. This paper, based on a synthesis of key policy documents, an analysis of…

The concept of readability has had a variable history, moving from a position where it was considered as a very important topic for those responsible for producing texts and matching those texts to the abilities and needs of learners, to its current declining visibility in the education literature. Some important work has been coming from the USA…

This paper describes an exploration into a reform of the A-level qualification in England in 2008; namely, the introduction of the "stretch and challenge" policy. This policy was initiated by the exams regulator and determined that exam papers should be redesigned to encourage the application of higher order thinking skills, both in the classroom…

The two authors share learning gleaned from personal, classroom experiences in small schools--both cautions and assurances--for other educators who may be embarking on a similar path. We worked at two different small high school sites in the Denver Public Schools, an urban district with an ethnically diverse student population of 78,000. We…

This article considers disciplinary-based knowledge and its recontextualisation and acquisition in the secondary school curriculum. It starts from the premise that teaching disciplinary knowledge is important. The focus is the subject of geography and the increasingly influential realist school of thought in the sociology of education and the…

The middle of the 1990s saw the creation of a French-German-Swiss history textbook supported by the European Commission. Disseminated to school instructors in the Upper Rhine, it received generally positive reviews, but ended up on the dusty shelves of school libraries. This result was due to several factors, which are analysed in this article.…

The focus in this article is on the role of symbol and metaphor in the development of student self-awareness and engagement in the process of learning. It draws on a case-study which explored the process of an inquiry-based learning project in an Indigenous learning centre in a school in New South Wales, Australia. The data used for this article…

This article explores a notion of "personalising learning" which puts the learner at the centre, supported by mobile technology and teacher mediation. It reports a small study in the Northern Territory of Australia, with indigenous students who were given mobile camera phones to capture aspects of their everyday lives and bring them into school.…