This paper examines an initiative promoting collaboration between schools located in a city setting in Northern Ireland, which is broadly divided along ethnic and political lines. The schools involved, like the vast majority of schools in Northern Ireland, educate Protestant and Catholic children separately. This presents particular challenges for…

Schools in China and elsewhere are starting to teach English as a second language or foreign language (FL) to students at increasingly earlier ages. Although young learners (YLs), due to their developmental stage, are likely to be particularly susceptible to the influence of parents, parents' roles in YLs' motivation to learn English as…

This study focused on the impact of using Socratic questioning, based on the Paideia Method, on the nature of middle-schools students' patterns of interaction and on the cognitive complexity of their discussions. The hypothesis is that an experimental group will increase in both interaction focus and complexity at T3, which is the…

This study examines models of variables posited to predict students' homework motivation management (HMM), based on survey data from 866 8th graders (61 classes) and 745 11th graders (46 classes) in the south-eastern USA. Most of the variance in HMM occurred at the student level, with parent education as the only significant predictor at the…

This article uses the author's original study of over hundred Year six children's perspectives of literacy and the wider curriculum, in English schools, to explore the potential challenges of exploring "pupil voice". Using collective case studies, with descriptive and time-sampled observations, and semi-structured interviews,…

As English has increasingly become associated with social and economic power in the context of globalisation, there has been a growing concern regarding achievement gaps in English that appear to be correlated to learners' socio-economic status (SES). The present study aims to examine how parents' SES and their behaviours and beliefs…

The aim with the present study was to investigate bystander actions in bullying situations as well as reasons behind these actions as they are articulated by Swedish students from fourth to seventh grade. Forty-three semi-structured individual interviews were conducted with students. Qualitative analysis of data was performed by methods from…

This paper reports on a national study, involving a mixed-method research design comprising a randomised controlled trial (RCT), text analysis, student and teacher interviews and lesson observations. It set out to investigate whether contextualised teaching of grammar, linked to the teaching of writing, would improve student outcomes in writing…

School choice has been actively exercised by mostly middle class parents and "key" schools in many places in China, each obtaining what they want: school places and funds, respectively. The aims of this study were to explore the impact of positional competition in school choice and explore the effect of market mechanisms in the resulting school…

This paper summarises our research into the relationship between pupil assessment at age 14 (Key Stage 3) and participation in age 16+ education. We question whether a systematic gap between teacher-based assessment and externally marked tests indicates assessment bias or uncertainty, either in testing procedures or through teachers' perceptions…

This paper reports on research into how schools, parents and local communities work together to support students' learning during the transition from primary to secondary schools in what is referred to as the middle years of schooling. The research was conducted in four Australian schools within one urban school district. These schools were…

All interest necessarily links the person with the external environment: the object/s of interest. Research into children's interests is examined in the context of a rapidly-expanding literature which has generated several powerful concepts in recent decades, notably "individual interest", "situational interest" and "topic interest". The first is…