Background: Student teachers struggle with a wide range of problems because they are lacking professional knowledge, inexperienced in dealing with colleagues and students, and unfamiliar with school environments. It is essential for the survival of student teachers to establish supportive relationships for professional and personal help.…

In spite of the introduction of a National Curriculum in UK schools and the improved progression and continuity that it promised, pupils still have problems with learning when they transfer from primary to secondary school. These problems are particularly acute in science. One approach is to provide a programme of "bridging work", focused on…

Addressing recent calls for investigating the specific quality of reflection associated with the uses of portfolios in teacher education, this paper describes and interprets the "practice of portfolio construction" as revealed in the construction and presentation of two kinds of portfolio in two in-service courses for mentors of teachers in…

An increasing number of classroom assistants (also called teaching assistants and sometimes learning support assistants) are employed in schools throughout the UK, but their impact appears variable. This paper presents an evaluation of a local authority project which placed five additional classroom assistants (CAs) in three primary schools in…

In sociometric research tradition, popularity is defined as the degree to which children are liked or accepted by their peers. However, research indicates that two definitions of popular students should be distinguished: (1) popular students as those students who are well liked by many and disliked by few peers, and (2) popular students as those…

As part of a project designed to provide information on the nature and uses of within-class pupil groupings for teaching and learning in secondary schools in England, this paper focuses on qualitative interviews with 20 teachers from three core curriculum areas in six schools. Interviews concerned the range and explanations for teachers' choices…

Evidence suggests that phonic interventions delivered by trained researchers improve early reading and spelling. This study sought to explore whether school Learning Support Assistants (LSAs) can also improve performance using these methods. Four groups (each of n=27) of the poorest reading 6-year-old children in nine schools were screened and…

The purpose of this study was to find out: (a) pupils' attitudes towards open-ended science investigations, and (b) the problems that pupils encounter when carrying out such investigations in groups. The study was conducted in a class of 39 primary 6 pupils of mixed ability who carried out four investigations. Data were based on pupils' responses…

In order to find out what children would suggest as useful interventions to stop bullying, we designed a questionnaire administered to 311 children (155 boys and 156 girls; mean age=11 years). Thirty-six items were employed to ask children how effective, in their opinion, retaliation, nonchalance and assertiveness could be in stopping bullying.…

In this paper, I examine some issues within the new frontier of integrating technology into teacher education and professional development. I present an approach to teach a secondary mathematics methods course integrating technology. Specifically, this study focuses on how the integration of multimedia and online discussion into a mathematics…

What motivates adult language learners in the city of Belfast to enrol and remain in an Irish class in the first years of the twenty-first century is the subject of the research study reported here. The research is placed within the context of the long history of interest in Irish revival in the city as far back as the eighteenth century and is…

This paper sheds light on previously unresearched dimensions in the private-parochial school environment, which help account for the willingness of private school teachers to accept salaries inferior to those offered in public (state) schools. In-depth biographical interviews with a group of 18 Canadian university graduates, qualified to teach in…

This study applied two arithmetic tests, one written and one computer-based interactive, to samples of primary school children from two populations, one suburban non-Aboriginal and one rural Aboriginal. The results from the written test were significantly (p<0.001) better for the non-Aboriginal children than for the Aboriginal children. This was…

In setting the cut-scores on National Curriculum tests it is important to maintain standards. In the process of test development, both within and across years, changes are made to the style of the questions in order to increase their "accessibility". This raises the question of whether a more accessible test should have higher cut-scores. Purely…

The ability to search, process, extract, evaluate and integrate information for learning purposes has clearly become the basic skills of the twenty first century. Although this process is often taken as a cognitive process, research has shown a strong connection between emotion and cognition. Recent research has suggested that positive emotions…