This formative experiment explored the extent to which two instructional frameworks that varied in the explicitness of academic vocabulary instruction, comprehension strategy instruction, and supports for student autonomy influenced reading comprehension, vocabulary acquisition, perceptions of autonomy supports, and reading engagement in…

This article discusses issues associated with statistical testing conducted with data from clustered school samples. Empirical researchers often conduct tests of statistical inference on sample data to ascertain the extent to which differences exist within groups in the population. Typically, much school-related data are collected from students.…

Language teachers spend much of their time providing corrective feedback on students' writing in hope of helping them improve grammatical accuracy. Turning to research for guidance, however, can leave practitioners with few concrete answers as to the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (CF). Debate in the literature continues, reflecting…

Over the past twenty-five years researchers have been concerned with understanding the science student. The need for such research is still grounded in contemporary issues including providing opportunities for all students to develop scientific literacy and the failure of school science to connect with student's lives, interests and personal…

Are you using interviews in your classroom? Carolyn Frank's new book on interviewing is a powerful tool for teachers and educational researchers. Through an anthropological frame, this book explains techniques for ethnographic interviews and observations in and out of the classroom. Carolyn Frank shows how teachers in particular can use…

Inherent in classroom research are the inevitable, and often unanticipated, challenges experienced by researchers. This article moves beyond the main issues highlighted in the literature and identifies some of the problems the authors encountered when conducting two common methodological procedures, classroom observations and stimulated recall…

Teachers' subject knowledge is recognized as an essential component of effective teaching. In the foreign language context, teachers' subject knowledge includes language proficiency. In New Zealand high schools, foreign languages (e.g. Chinese, French, German, Japanese and Spanish) have recently been offered to learners earlier in their schooling,…

Incidents of bias still occur in college classrooms, but no research has specifically explored this topic. To address this gap in the literature, professors (N = 333) completed anonymous surveys assessing types of bias they perceived in their classroom, their responses to the bias, and the perceived success of their responses. Results indicated…

This article examines the outcomes of an eight-month professional development initiative, designed to support six Writing Project teachers' classroom inquiry projects, each focused on improving an aspect of student writing. We begin by introducing the genesis of these classroom research projects as well as the structure and content of the support…

The very first edition of "Primary Science Review" included an article entitled "Teaching primary science--how research can help" (Harlen, 1986), which announced that a section of the journal would be for reports of research and particularly for teachers reporting their classroom research. The intervening 24 years have seen…

This article examines preservice teachers' conceptions of classroom management and organization in light of their training and beliefs about good teaching. Students in their final year of a 5-year program discussed their definitions and conceptions of classroom management, organization, and rule systems through an open-ended questionnaire.…

Defined as "any systemic inquiry conducted by teachers... for the purpose of gathering information about how their particular schools operate, how they teach, and how their students learn" (Mertler, 2009), "action research" is empowering and professional research done by teachers to inform and improves their own practices. Although there are many…

The purpose of this classroom-based study was to discover the kinds of skill integration tasks that were employed by English teachers in Kuwait and to measure their attitudes toward implementing the skill integration technique in their classrooms. Data collection involved recording 25 hours of classroom-based observations, conducting interviews…

Using the story of a fight between an African American male student and a white male student in a high school classroom, I trace not only the raced and classed actors involved, but also the story of my sense making as a practicing teacher and researcher. Drawing on the concept of intersectionality, I show how a story that seems as simple as a…

This was a simple classroom research project and its purpose was to examine how high up in the scale of Bloom's taxonomy students were able to reach to understand higher order thinking skills when studying critical thinking questions. Two classes of senior high school students who had been studying in the same bilingual program for five years were…