From March 1999 to August 2000, the authors were involved in simultaneous internal and external evaluations of the social civic and political education (SCaPE) project in Northern Ireland. This project was a major initiative established by the Citizenship Foundation, the Northern Ireland Council for the Curriculum, Examination and Assessment…

This research paper focuses on "teacher-led" primary school visits to the Eden Project in Cornwall, England. It considers the objectives of school visits and the aims of the Eden Project. The strategies used by the Eden Project to convey their messages are investigated and effective strategies for learning are evaluated, based on observations and…

In foreign language education, new professional demands are made on teachers. Foreign language teaching can no longer be regarded as a mainly linguistic task. Teachers are now required to teach intercultural communicative competence. Internationally, the assumption seems to be that teachers are already moving in the advocated direction and are…

This paper contains a consideration of the nature and role of warrants for research conclusions in educational research. The paper argues the need for an explicit warrant in the form of a logical and persuasive link between the evidence produced and the conclusions drawn (with appropriate qualifications and caveats). It describes social scientific…

This study focuses on the relationship between the personality characteristics of entering law students and academic success in law school. The subjects (137) were entering law school students at Pepperdine University School of Law. Students were administered the California Psychological Inventory (CPI) as a measure of their temperament and…

The Cognitive Acceleration in Mathematics Education (CAME) project aims to improve children's thinking in mathematics and to enhance their achievement. The learning theory underpinning it is described as "Piaget and Vygotsky in tandem", together with a theory of professional development involving networks of teachers and direct modelling of…

Interviews, questionnaires and tests may fail as evaluations of pragmatic competence in a foreign language because they cannot reproduce contexts in sufficient detail and/or because they cannot constrain discourse options without contaminating the learner response. In this study a cartoon Discourse Completion Test (DCT) prompt was used, providing…

The aim of this small-scale study was to investigate the effect of pupil-generated ground rules on peer group learning in a class of 9-year-old boys. The study examined the type of talk used by participants working in a group before the introduction of ground rules and compared this with that used after the introduction of ground rules. It was…

This study examines the justifications given by serving teachers of secondary mathematics for their decisions to become teachers. Forty-five teachers, from two regions of England, were interviewed about their professional life histories with one element of the semi-structured schedule including an invitation to colleagues to discuss their motives…

The literature on the use of problem-based learning in K-12 settings has traditionally focused on gifted and average students. However, mainstreaming is placing increasing numbers of students with special needs in general education classrooms. This case study examined how members of a small group in a mainstreamed seventh grade science class…

This paper synthesized studies of professional development for middle school content area teachers and the teachers' subsequent implementation of literacy strategies. Four studies were identified as having a majority of participants teaching English/reading, mathematics, science, and social studies in grades 6 through 8. Articles meeting the…

Recent changes in the field of school counseling have called for professional school counselors to provide evidence of the effect their work has on the academic success of their students. This article presents the findings of a multi faceted action research intervention designed to help students at risk for retention. Findings indicate that…

In the experimental phase of this mixed-methods study, 49 middle school students receiving special education services took notes from the Internet under either a written notes or a copy-and-paste notes condition. Immediate, cued-recall measures of factual learning showed that students who wrote their notes were better able to recall what they had…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the perceptions Latino eighth grade students have of school and schooling factors as they transition to high school and the factors that may influence their self-perceived likelihood of graduating from high school. Middle schools are poised to help Latino students prepare themselves for a smoother…

Adolescence is a critical period of development. Previous research suggests parent involvement in school directly impacts student success. However, different types of parental involvement and the efforts of middle school personnel to educate parents about these effective practices have received scant attention in the literature. The level and type…