The curriculum is often the target of reform and governments use a range of accountability measures to ensure compliance. This paper examines the decisions schools in England make regarding history provision, in a period of curriculum change, and the potential consequences of these decisions. Drawing on a large, longitudinal data set, of primary…

In the design and development of new school buildings, areas equipped with state-of-the-art technology and large, flexible spaces intended for collaborative teaching and learning are becoming increasingly common. This is in line with an understanding that this kind of learning environment reflects the contexts for work young learners are likely to…

Education in many countries is heavily influenced by what has been termed a Global Education Reform Movement, based on competition, measurement and comparison. As well as emphasising external accountability, this landscape offers schools, in theory, a degree of autonomy. School-level innovation, however, may involve a degree of courage on the part…

This review and synthesis of relevant literature considers the nature of boredom and boredom proneness in general terms before focusing on how the academic boredom experienced by undergraduates at university is sufficiently different from other known types to warrant a unique and important field of study. Derived from within the literature itself,…

We make a "prima facie" case for identifying a single pathway in the learning of Hindu-Arabic numerical symbols and discuss why this ability may be a critical gateway concept in developing mathematical competencies. A representative sample of English and Scottish children was assessed using a number symbol identification paradigm in the…

This paper elaborates on the notion of object-oriented collaborative learning by building on empirical material from two case studies in higher education. Prior empirical findings show how knowledge objects are evolving entities, shaped by the interactions between participants, and how students learn from engaging in knowledge practice that…

The "Collaborative Knowledge Practices Questionnaire" (CKP) is an instrument designed to measure the learning of knowledge-work competence in education. The focus is on qualities of knowledge work which can be learned and taught in multiple educational settings and which may be especially important for courses with collaborative…

This exploratory case study was conducted in two upper secondary schools in Finland and Bulgaria. The aim of the study was to investigate how to apply trialogical design principles could be used to improve students' knowledge work competence, and teachers' re-structured obligatory courses following pedagogical design principles for knowledge…

A blended university course whose design is inspired by the Trialogical Learning Approach is presented. The structure, activities, and content of the course are described in detail and followed by an explorative case-study conducted on data collected during the 2017-2018 edition of the course. The general aim was to understand the impact of the…

Technological and social developments during the past years emphasise the importance of knowledge work competence. Additionally, funding of universities in Finland was changed to be based largely on yearly accumulated credits, therefore, improving retention is of critical importance for the institution. In order to improve first-year retention…

Could knowledge work practices become pervasive in formal education? Could knowledge creation pedagogies help us close the gap between graduates' knowledge work competencies and fast changing needs of the knowledge society? In this commentary, I first revisit the most notable contributions of this special issue. Then, I turn to some overarching…

In this article, we consider the relationships between schools and their local religious contexts and develop a new empirically-informed middle-level theory for analysing these relationships as a complex framework of negotiations. This framework is based on a meta-synthesis of qualitative data from forty-five case-studies of schools in Great…

Intervention to raise the literacy achievement of disadvantaged groups in society has focused on preschool literacy development because it is predictive of later educational achievement and because research has shown that key strands of literacy emerge very early in childhood. Intervention programmes to promote emergent literacy are likely to be…

This study aimed at exploring secondary school teachers' cognitions regarding bully-victims, including what handling strategies those teachers often adopt to tackle the dual problem inherent to this population. In this study, 13 secondary school teachers were invited to participate in interviews, and the results indicated that most of the teachers…

This study adopts a testimonial approach to bullying victimisation, and aims to create a deeper understanding of the experiences and effects of being a bullying target. Four written narratives about being subjected to school bullying were analysed according to interpretative phenomenological analysis. From the analysis, four themes were…