This article details how an action research/reflective practitioner approach added value to the efforts of participants who were engaged in developing their practice and working together within a New Labour area-based policy initiative. The process of reflecting and learning together in the project supported practitioners in thinking, learning…

This article reports upon a 3-year action research programme intended to provide trainee teachers with peer support in planning and carrying out class teaching. It was hoped that this would provide an additional encouragement for trainee-teachers to broaden their teaching repertoire, together with better opportunities to reflect on and evaluate…

Introduces various aspects of truth theories in the context of action research, focusing on truth as correspondence, truth as successful practice, and truth as coherence and paradigmatic truth. The paper describes how action research uncovers the truth, discusses pen discourse as a validity criterion (the truth as consensus), and looks at the…

Describes a course at one Argentinean university, founded on Freirian principles, called Didactics of Everyday School Practice, which encourages student teachers to reflect on how their practice involves real action toward utopia, thus empowering them to become autonomous learners so that as teachers, they will never deny others the right to speak…

Presents findings from four problem-based research sites, exploring theory generation and practice improvement in the context of how mental health service users become positioned. Interview and observation data highlight an exclusion of service users that perpetuates fragmented delivery and response. The article shows that problem-based and action…

Describes an Australian study designed to promote professional growth of beginning elementary teachers through participatory action research. Beginning teachers collaborated with university faculty, forming action research groups which focused on specific aspects of teaching. Data from teacher journals, reports, and meetings indicated that…

Discusses issues surrounding teacher research and the validity of qualitative study, exploring one teacher researcher's route through a small-scale qualitative study. The article uses attempts to implement a critically ethnographic approach and dilemmas of trying to live the theoretical principles of the research methodology as the basis for…

Challenges the belief that high stakes tests are the keystone of students' educational attainment, describing a series of exploratory workshops, developed in reaction to this issue, in which teachers (as essential preparation for developing students' curiosity) deepened their understanding of the principles of physics by playing with light. Such…

Describes how self-assessment was introduced into a Certificate in Education course for practicing British teachers in the post-compulsory sector and how the method and instrument of self-assessment was refined over successive cohorts, focusing on an action research project that was developed to change students' responses to the self-assessment's…

Describes an action research project designed to improve the examination performance of advanced-level history students who performed better at age 16 than at age 18. After a weakness in essay writing was found, a teaching strategy for improving essay writing was developed. The action plan drew on the ideas of phenomenography. Students taught in…

Describes the Teacher-as-Ethnographer inservice training program, an anthropological model for training Israeli educators to diagnose and cater to the learning needs of culturally diverse students. Participants, including teachers of all levels and other school staff, learned and used ethnographic methods of data collection and analysis to conduct…

An American teaching anesthesiology in Tanzania sought help from a member of the host culture in order to grasp cultural meanings underpinning medical education practices, using action research to develop and refine research methods and solve problems related to the need to accommodate culturally diverse students' learning needs. (SM)

Examines the value of action research within the context of the professionalization of teachers in continuing education, describing continuing education based on action research and highlighting a training course on school counseling and guidance for secondary school teachers that allowed educators to explore the relationship between teaching and…

Describes an action research inquiry conducted by a primary science tutor, focusing on his work with preservice and inservice teachers. The paper examines parallels between the research process and the researcher's approach to teaching adult learners. Both were underpinned by explicit epistemological assumptions based on a constructivist view of…

Describes a project that trained institutional policymakers in action research regarding problems in developing training policies about young people's needs, examining attempts to collaborate and dialog with stakeholders and discussing how project members became enmeshed in complex sets of relationships calling for construction of dialog in…