The paper is based on interviews with a sample of 200 teachers from the Limpopo province about their life histories, particularly those aspects related to their choice of teaching as their first career path, and their expectations, experiences and perceptions in this regard. It argues that current approaches to teacher education in South Africa…

The higher skills policy of the UK New Labour Government emerged from the recommendations of the Leitch Review of Skills, and was implemented in England between 2007 and 2010. The policy aimed to encourage higher education (HE) institutions to engage with employers and employer representative bodies to design and deliver HE provision that…

Collaborative learning can, if designed and implemented properly, contribute to student learning outcomes and prepare them for teamwork. However, the design and implementation of collaborative learning in practice depend on beliefs of lecturers about teaching and learning in general, and collaborative learning in particular. One hundred and…

Higher education research is, by its nature, rather an introspective field of study. It is also highly dispersed within and beyond the academy: inherently, therefore, it is a multidisciplinary field of study. An analysis of 567 articles published in 15 leading higher education journals in 2010 demonstrates both the breadth of interest in higher…

The European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has promoted the implementation of a teaching methodology based on competences. Drawing on New Institutional Sociology, the present work aims to identify and improve knowledge concerning the factors which are hindering that change in the Spanish university system. This is investigated using a case study…

Collaboration in teacher education can be seen as a way to prepare student teachers for future social practices at school. When people collaborate with each other, they have to regulate their collaboration. In the Dutch teacher education programme that was investigated, student teachers were members of different types of groups, each of which had…

This article addresses the issue of university teachers' emotions generated through teaching and interacting with students. While research on school teachers' emotions is on the increase, interest in the significance of university teachers' emotions is still limited. In light of the growing attention given to the quality of…

This study compared the impact of three types of instructional methods (case-based learning, worked example and faded worked example) on preservice teachers' (n?=?72) decision-making about classroom management. A quasi-experimental study was conducted to investigate both the outcomes and the processes of preservice teachers'…

The main objective of this study is to determine to what extent the values held by student teachers at the start of a university degree programme coincide with the values that practising teachers consider important for their profession. Our findings show that student teachers and practising teachers have different value profiles, and that there is…

This article reports on the results of a qualitative case study that addresses recent calls for greater attention to clinical aspects of practice and experiment in teacher education programmes. Grounded in the notion of approximations of practice, this study uses the analytic lens of teacher identity to understand how one group of preservice…

The main aim of the present study was to investigate why some students do not continue in science-oriented studies in higher education despite that their previous career in secondary education proved that they were interested and suitably qualified to do so. We introduced a new approach to deal with these students' attitudes towards science,…

"Item difficulty modelling" is a technique used for a number of purposes such as to support future item development, to explore validity in relation to the constructs that influence difficulty and to predict the difficulty of items. This research attempted to explore the factors influencing question difficulty in a general qualification…

A major criticism of the Community of Practice theory is that it mainly focuses on the inward induction process of learning while neglecting the outbound trajectory. Yet, this criticism still remains at the hypothetical level in most of the literature. This paper aims to advance the theory by addressing this criticism on an empirical basis. The…

This paper presents the findings of a study designed to explore qualification users' perceptions and experiences of reliability in the context of national assessment outcomes in England. The study consisted of 17 focus groups conducted across six sectors of qualification users: students, teachers, trainee teachers, job-seekers, employers and…

There is a wide consensus that during their year abroad higher education (HE) language students should improve their language skills in contact with native speakers in the host community. Research shows, however, that many students find it difficult, if not impossible, to make meaningful contact to locals, and some consider the lack of it as a…