Little is in print on the development in Britain of university disciplines including the academic study of education. This paper provides a historical narrative of the study of adolescence from the 1870 Education Act to the contemporary day. Adolescence textbooks are examined in the context of changes in the education system, such as the demand…

Today's educational environment forms the stage for a host of debates, many of which centre on the use of standardized assessment in the classroom. With this push towards standardization, less time is being devoted to incorporating 'experiential' knowledge, or that knowledge which comes from hands-on, travel, natural and other worldly experiences,…

The present study was designed to investigate the relationships between role strains following the transition to secondary school and academic achievement. Academic engagement was hypothesized to mediate between role strain and achievement. The sample consisted of 749 students in their first year of secondary school. Four types of role strain were…

This study investigated their views concerning evidence and expert opinion of 10th-grade students, accessed by an open-ended questionnaire in the context of a socio-scientific issue: the cause of flood disasters, and personal epistemology identified by the "Learning Environment Preference Questionnaire" (LEP). Students' responses to the open-ended…

Numerous definitions of literacy have been advanced by policy-makers, politicians, academics, teachers and others over the years. It is not always easy, however, to know how one definition might relate to another or differ from it. This paper offers a framework, based on the work of the educational philosopher Israel Scheffler, for identifying and…

This paper explores the concept of ethos as a facet of the government's rapidly growing initiative of the "specialist school". Schools accepted on to the scheme are expected to create a new identity, or ethos: but what exactly is meant by that rather nebulous term? And, in reality, is something as all-consuming as a school ethos, or culture,…

The purpose of this study was to establish the usage of research and theory in the teaching of English language in secondary schools in Botswana. Altogether 100 questionnaires were administered in 19 secondary schools. The results of this study indicate that teachers rarely ever refer to language research in their teaching. Less value was also…

The study examined relationships among family social status, perceptions of family and school learning environments, and measures of children's academic achievement, educational aspirations and self-concept. Data were collected from 261 (128 boys, 133 girls) 11-year-old Taiwanese children. The findings from structural equation modelling suggest…

The study examines the relationship between social inequalities (stratificational, gender and other disparities) and schooling, including academic attainment, longitudinally, in Slovenia. The issue is indicated most clearly at the tertiary education level. The basic finding is the parallel between educational expansion and the diminution of social…

In this article, we study the impact of the so-called non-meritocratic factors gender, immigrant origin and social origin, and the meritocratic factors ability and achievement, on timely graduation within a specific high school type. Furthermore, the possible influence of teacher assessments of students in elementary school is investigated.…

This paper reviews the work on gendered achievement in the English-speaking Caribbean, with its often explicit focus on underachieving males. However, patterns of gendered achievement are more likely region-specific and variegated in some contexts. In Trinidad and Tobago, the full-scale implementation of national assessments in 2004 provided an…

The aim of this paper is to offer an additional perspective to the understanding of educational change processes by clarifying the significance of identity learning. Today's innovations require changes in teachers' professional identity. Identity learning involves a relation between social-cognitive construction of new meanings and individual,…

The arrival of refugee pupils in UK schools has presented significant challenges to staff, pupils and families. The aim of this study was to record and analyse the views of teaching staff regarding their experiences of integrating these pupils into schools in Newcastle upon Tyne. A questionnaire was sent to 53 schools in the city known to have…

In this age of new media, children are exposed to media messages at an early age. What can we do when the mass media exert such a great influence on children? One proposal has been for the introduction of a new school subject: media education. Though media education has not been part of the official curriculum in Hong Kong, some schools, both…

Differences in family factors in determining academic achievement were investigated by testing 432 parents in nine independent, coeducational Melbourne schools. Schools were ranked and categorized into three groups (high, medium and low), based on student achievement (ENTER) scores in their final year of secondary school and school improvement…