In recent years, policy-makers in England, Australia and other countries have called for measures to increase male recruitment to the teaching profession, particularly to the primary sector. This policy of targeted recruitment is predicated upon a number of unexamined assumptions about the benefits of matching teachers and pupils by gender. For…

Research has shown the importance of students' perceptions of a learning environment and the existence of discrepancies between students' and teachers' perceptions. Participatory design could be a helpful strategy to reduce such discrepancies and eventually improve the design of learning environments, as it has proven to be effective to optimize…

The induction period is a very important time in the career of a teacher and has a long-term influence on the teacher's professional development, efficacy, job satisfaction and the length of his/her career. One of the key roles in this period is played by the trainee's mentor. This paper presents the results of the extensive project "Partnership…

Much of the research in higher education has treated student bodies as homogeneous groups with a consequent neglect of any consideration of gender differences. To test the validity of such research a questionnaire was administered to 255 psychology students. The results showed some important differences in responses between the genders. In…

The movement of families around the world is becoming increasingly common, whether involuntarily (as a result of war or famine, for instance) or voluntarily (resulting from economic migration or a parent's occupation). Though one of the effects of globalization is the growing number of professional parents whose occupation causes them to move…

Good teaching is open to change and it involves constantly trying to find out what the effects of instruction are on learning, and modifying that instruction in the light of the evidence. Similarly, the ultimate outcome of instructional practice is effective student learning. Therefore, in this perspective, adequately meeting the varying needs of…

Research on the well-being of teachers was conducted at the request of the Department of Education in Flanders, Belgium. The goals were: (1) to construct an instrument for the Education Inspectorate; and (2) to conduct a survey in order to identify school-related conditions relevant for teachers' professional well-being. Based on literature and…

Randomized controlled trials in educational research tend to be small. Small trials can have large, chance, imbalances in important covariates. For studies with sample sizes greater than 50, chance imbalances can be corrected using analysis of covariance; for small trials, however, statistical power is maximized if the trial is balanced and…

This paper is the second of two articles arising from a study of the association between pupil mobility and attainment in national tests and examinations in an inner London borough. Our first article examined the association of pupil mobility with attainment and progress during primary school. It concluded that pupil mobility had little impact on…

Large numbers of students from the Chinese-speaking world are nowadays enrolled in Western universities, prompting the need for awareness of their educational beliefs and practices. Although an established literature seeks to characterize "the Chinese learner", much of this research results in stereotypical representations of a "reduced Other":…

This longitudinal study set out to examine, in the light of the parents' education and gender and the child's gender, the changes that occurred in the course of five years in parents' satisfaction with the functioning of their child's school. Academically and vocationally educated mothers and fathers (N = 391) were asked to indicate their…

This paper examines whether having school students repeat a year improves their performance, focusing on learning English as a foreign language. It takes students' English examination results from five years from a Chinese-medium school, together with data on their learning styles and learning strategies. Drawing on local cultural and pedagogic…

Social identity, cultural socialization, intergroup contact hypothesis and group threat theories were used to examine White middle school adolescents' beliefs and attitudes toward Middle Eastern peers (Chaldeans). Ten focus group interviews in each of five Midwestern schools supported the hypothesized relationships between White majority/minority…

This article uses a Latina/o critical theory framework (LatCrit), as a branch of critical race theory (CRT) in education, to understand how discourses of racist nativism--the institutionalized ways people perceive, understand and make sense of contemporary US immigration, that justifies "native" ("white") dominance, and reinforces hegemonic…

Nativism is a forgotten ideology which nevertheless operates in the current era as illustrated by the resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment and restrictionistic policies in response to growing Latino/a immigration. This response to Latino/a immigration recalls a historic era from the early 1900s known as the Americanization period which was also…