The focus of this article is on examining Norwegian teachers' perception of what factors at the school's organisational level have facilitated their participation in a school-based health promotion project. The study is based on 12 semistructured interviews with teachers from two of the pilot schools participating in the European Network of Health…

The purpose of this article is to critically examine some stated discrepancies between qualitative and quantitative research by taking actual studies as a starting point. It is argued that in ordinary empirical research within psychology and education, both approaches should be considered based on critical realism, and that the ordinary validity…

A 4-year-long action research project involving curriculum development in education for sustainable living as part of home economics in a university teacher education course is described and analysed. Design experiments were used to develop the curriculum and promote learning. The design experiments emphasised an integrating approach to action…

Pupils' responses in Grade 6 to a 40-item questionnaire originally constructed to reveal different school attitudes were re-analysed using recently developed techniques for latent variable analysis of two-level data. One aim was to test a model for investigation of classroom environment and another aim was to compare exploratory factor analysis…

A model for analysing the nature of the dyadic teacher-student interplay in instructional situations including one teacher and one student is described. The "teacher" may be a regular teacher, a parent, or any other person who is in the position of teacher. The "student" may be a student of any age. The model may discern (a) if the teacher merely…

Finnish early childhood education can be defined as practical educational activity, as a discipline, or as a field of science. This study focuses on the academic connections of early childhood education and concentrates on the identification of actors according to Bourdieu's field theory. The roots of academic early childhood education go back…

This paper examines how student teachers in Norway and England perceive pupil misbehaviour. The data are based on an opportunistic questionnaire survey of 86 student teachers in Kristiansand and 100 student teachers in York. Student teachers' perceptions of the seriousness of infractions were significantly different with regard to 7 of the items,…

Ability estimates yielded by the one- (1PL), two- (2PL), and three-parameter (3PL) models and the nominal response model (NRM) were compared with the number-right (NR) scoring model using items not susceptible to test-wiseness (NTW) and items susceptible to the ID1 test-wiseness strategy. These items were contained in grade 12 diploma examinations…

Sixty-nine grade 2 boys participated in a study of the effects of book genre and sex of reading model on boys' (a) view of reading as feminine, (b) intrinsic motivation toward reading, (c) interest in reading, and (d) attitude to reading. Differential effects occurred in boys based on whether they liked or disliked reading and whether they viewed…

This research examines the effects of social capital on teacher identity in a sample of undergraduate after-degree education students who took most or all of their courses together as a cohort. A theoretical model containing nine variables including university and social background, social capital, and teacher identity is presented. The data…

In this study we explored a triad partnership among preservice department instructors and teacher candidates, community practitioners, and partners in a community-university research alliance (CURA). All partners were interviewed about their perceptions of their role in the partnership, the effectiveness of the collaboration, and the key lessons…

This study examines to what extent fathers' and mothers' involvement in schooling is related to children's school outcomes, taking into account differences in family social status, social structure, and children's perceptions of their school learning environments. The findings suggested that (a) mothers were more involved in their children's…

Currently researchers connected to university contexts who conduct research involving human participants must receive approval from a research ethics board, and in the case of school-based research, from school district authorities. This article focuses on the ethics review of school-based research. Applications submitted to a research ethics…

In this article the author uses Levi-Strauss' (1966) metaphor of Bricolage to examine how teachers, not policymakers, make sense of their "problems of practice" in three United States high schools. The article also examines how teachers address these problems of practice. It concludes by underscoring the disconnect between teachers' and…

This article presents the findings of an online survey administered to Alberta elementary school teachers in 2000-2001. The survey explored the teachers' knowledge and use of Canadian children's literature and their thoughts about the role of Canadian literature in elementary school classrooms. Canadian children's trade books espouse particular…