This paper draws on data from a project undertaken with children (N?=?72) in Mongolia and Zambia. The research is distinctive in bringing together diverse children, ranging from those living on the street to those in mainstream education and involving them in discussions about educational research. Being conscious of critiques of adult-initiated…

The gender-related challenges facing males entering the primary-school teaching profession have been well documented in the academic literature over recent decades. The majority of these data have come about through qualitative reports. Whilst qualitative methods provide important perspectives into these issues, the use of valid and reliable…

Involving children and young people in educational research has been foundational in developing and understanding theories of learning, and understanding child development. Attempts to identify children's perspectives on policies and practices that directly affect them in educational settings have resulted in an increase in the involvement of…

This paper reports on a number of challenges faced in tracing contributors to research projects that were originally conducted many decades previously. The need to trace contributors in this way arises in projects which focus on involving research participants in previous studies who have not been maintained on a database, or with whom the…

School reform on a large scale has largely been unsuccessful. Approaches designed to document and understand the variety of organizational conditions that comprise our school systems are needed so that reforms can be tailored and results scaled. Therefore, this article develops a configurational framework that allows a systematic analysis of many…

This study aims to develop a short German version of the Self Description Questionnaire (SDQ I-GS) in order to present a robust economical instrument for measuring German preadolescents' multidimensional self-concept. A full German version of the SDQ I (SDQ I-G) that maintained the original structure and thus length of the English original…

This paper describes the design and methodology used to assess the impact of free primary education (FPE) policy in Nairobi, Kenya. The key outcome of the study was to assess the impact of FPE on schooling outcomes among the urban poor. The study assesses the impact of FPE by examining how two non-comparable groups responded to the introduction of…

This study focuses on the importance of increasing women's education as a result of Universal Primary Education (UPE) and its further impact on improving children's educational access in Tanzania. The study uses data from the 2007 Demographic Health Survey (DHS) for empirical analysis and it is informed by the historical accounts of the UPE reform…

This article centres on a research project in which freehand drawings provided a richly creative and colourful data source of children's imagined, ideal learning environments. Issues concerning the analysis of the visual data are discussed, in particular, how imaginative content was analysed and how the analytical process was dependent on an…

The draw-and-write technique for collecting data relating to both adult and children's perceptions of their world is receiving increasing attention as one which has status within the field of visual methods. This paper appraises the draw-and-write method and reflects on the methodological lessons learned by using the technique in two studies…

This article reports methodological aspects of a research study on the reasoning of teachers. The aim is to describe and evaluate the use of the stimulated recall method (STR) when information and communication technologies (ICTs) are involved in terms of educational settings and therefore in the research setting as well. First, we introduce the…

The use of qualitative analysis software has become extremely popular over the recent years; educational researchers now have a range of tools at their disposal, from the ubiquitous word processor to more specialized computer packages. This paper deals with the use of CAQDAS (computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software) in educational…

Social network analysis is increasingly used in the study of policy implementation and school leadership. A key question that remains is that of instrument validity--that is, the question of whether these social network survey instruments measure what they purport to measure. In this paper, we describe our work to examine the validity of the…

This paper focuses primarily on the methodological considerations of a study investigating the interactions of pairs of disabled and non-disabled children working together on computer-based tasks, in mainstream primary schools in Cyprus. Twenty dyads of pupils (each pair comprising a disabled child and a non-disabled peer), were observed and…

This paper reconsiders long-term, national or socially contextualized trends in a number of important education areas commonly addressed by policy interventions. These include widening participation, teacher training, school performance, the use of targets, and student assessment. In each case, it is very difficult to sustain an argument that…