This article explores some of the issues around the agenda for workforce reform as it applies to professionals who work in early years classrooms (4-7 year olds), who work alongside class teachers in supporting learning. Their changing roles, responsibilities and professional identities are examined through a small scale case study of four women,…

This article presents the results of an evaluation study in Physical Education (PE) in which 23 schools, 49 classes and 1142 year 4 Cypriot students participated. This study attempted to identify the extent to which a theoretical framework of educational effectiveness research based on Creemers' model can be developed. The relationship between…

Furlong and Oancea's influential framework for assessing the products of applied and practice-based educational inquiry raises some important issues about the criteria by which research should be judged. They begin by outlining the current significance of the issue, and some of the uncertainties surrounding the definition of applied and…

The authors report the development and validation of the Writing Dispositions Scale (WDS), a self-report instrument for measuring affective stances toward writing. The authors collected survey data from 854 elementary and middle school students and randomly split the data to facilitate both an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and a confirmatory…

Despite the fact that misbehavior in school is a pervasive problem to educators and despite its adverse consequences, few researchers have examined the range of misbehaviors by students, their antecedents, or their consequences. The authors used data from the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 (NELS:88) conducted by the National Center…

In this qualitative case study, the author describes (a) how parent liaisons in a diverse suburban district have supported school, family, and community partnerships and (b) the role played by the district family and community involvement specialist. On the basis of analyses of interview, observation, survey, and document data, the author…

The authors used a randomized design to investigate the effects of an enriched reading program, Schoolwide Enrichment Reading Model (SEM-R), with blocks of independent reading on oral reading fluency (ORF), reading comprehension, and attitudes toward reading for students in Grades 3-5. The authors used SEM-R in comparison with basal reading…

The authors examined experimentally whether student gender and socioeconomic status (SES) affect teachers' expectations of students. Participants were 106 teachers who read a scenario about a hypothetical student with academic and behavioral challenges. The authors systematically varied the gender and SES of the student to create 4 conditions.…

The authors reported findings from 3 studies examining the efficacy of Five Standards pedagogy in raising student achievement. Studies 1 and 2 were randomized designs; Study 3 was a quasi-experimental design. Samples included 53 teachers and 622 predominantly low-income Latino students in Grades 1-4. Studies assessed model fidelity with the…

In this design study, the authors documented means by which preservice teachers experienced mathematics and science associated with understanding the Moon and sky as they participated in project work within their mathematics and science methods course. The authors examined the way preservice teachers applied mathematics needed to accomplish…

The growing number of alternative schools seems to correlate with the mounting population of disenfranchised students. The higher the number of disenfranchised students, the more alternative schools are being built. This correlation may be caused by social, economic, and political issues that bring about pervasive social injustice, which…

The authors examined the impact of manipulative-based instruction on 2 independent cohorts of preservice elementary teachers. In Study 1, 50 participants engaged in problem solving with operations on whole numbers and fractions using concrete and representational manipulatives over 5 classes. Pre- to posttest performance on a mathematics survey…

Researchers have conducted studies of curriculum for doctoral students in various disciplines and subdisciplines. In this study, the authors examined methods (e.g., quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods) requirements for doctoral programs in education. Such requirements operationalize visions about the meaning of educational research and the…

If we are to fully understand and adequately respond to the multicultural question in European education, it is necessary to develop rich empirical descriptions and theoretically rigorous explanations of policy processes and effects. For example, we need to be able to characterise and explain the differentiated ways in which education policies and…

This article sets out the Dutch approach to the multicultural question. It focuses on how national policies, schools, teachers and teacher educators are addressing and making sense of questions of cultural and religious diversity. The article shows how the Netherlands has partly accommodated itself to greater cultural diversity through compulsory…