Background: Reflection is well established as an important part of teacher education, but it is also the focus of critical enquiry. This means that reflection is of interest to those who wish to explore its use to produce "better" teachers. It is also of interest to scholars who are interested in the wider implications of reflection, for example,…

Child-centered pedagogy is at the ideological core of progressive education. The simple idea that the child rather than the teacher or textbook should be the major focus of the classroom is, perhaps, the single most enduring educational idea of the era. In this historical study, the author argues that child-centered education emerged directly from…

A response is made to a paper that urges the use of the Rasch model for educational assessment. This paper argues that the model is inadequate and that claims for its efficacy are exaggerated and technically weak.

This paper argues that direct control of the early years literacy curriculum recently exercised by politicians in England has made the boundaries between research, policy and practice increasingly fragile. It describes how policy came to focus most effort on the use of synthetic phonics programmes in the early years. It examines why the…

In his inaugural Presidential Address, given to the BERA Conference 2013 at the University of Sussex, Ian Menter addresses a number of issues concerning educational policy and the contributions that educational research might make to policy development. As BERA approaches its fortieth anniversary, he also sets out some of the responsibilities that…

Even though the existence and importance of inner forms of sign-making are acknowledged in social-semiotic educational research, their contours have, none the less, yet to be charted in a systematic way. This article uses a combination of social-semiotic and pragmatist approaches to bring into focus some characteristics of pupils' inner…

This article puts forward a situated model of creative learning. Most educational studies on creativity tend to concentrate on explaining the relation between teaching and creativity while keeping learning as a secondary concept. However, it has been stated that it is likely that teaching creatively leads to creative learning, suggesting that…

Scrutiny of the socio-economic exclusion of the Roma in Central and Eastern Europe has brought attention to the widespread practice of school segregation of Romani children who are automatically placed in classes for the mentally disabled or shunted into separate and inferior schools and classrooms. It is now widely recognised that such practices…

The activities of the European Educational Research Association (EERA) and the yearly European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) are mainly organised in standing networks. Through the example of the Policy Studies and Politics of Education network, this article takes a closer look at network activity and the ways in which it contributes to…

The process of Europeanisation is closely linked to the process of an emerging European Educational Research Area and an education research identity. The European Conferences on Educational Research (ECER), European Educational Research Association (EERA) and its networks are involved in new directions and strands of educational research in…

Research associations tend to be voluntary by nature and therefore unstable in character, and thus are subject to threat for their continuity. History has shown that the European Educational Research Association (EERA) is not an exception to this rule. Because EERA Council and the board members are volunteers with limited time, experience and…

Self-regulation of learning, learning to learn, and their potential stimulation by specific information and communication technologies (ICTs) are main topics in European policy. This issue of the European Educational Research Journal (EERJ) focuses on research to develop, integrate and evaluate self-regulation of learning and the potential and…

The article addresses the role of network and mobile technologies in enhancing blended solutions with a view to (a) enriching the teaching/learning processes, (b) exploiting the opportunities it offers for their observability, and hence for their monitoring and formative/summative assessment. It will also discuss how such potential can only be…

With a point of departure in the concept of democracy, this article aims to show how Swedish Popular Adult Education influenced the content of the established school system in Sweden. The Popular Adult Education and established school systems are studied through their relation to democracy, based on curricula, as well as on visionary and political…

Universities have been collecting student feedback on their experiences in teaching and learning for decades. Their voice is usually captured in surveys, and quantitative and qualitative data are used for quality improvement. Quantitative data are often used to monitor the student experience and used as a key performance measure in universities.…