This book concisely explores the distinguishing features of scientific knowledge and research in early childhood education and care (ECEC). It has a dual-level focus of containing and relating the concrete practices of conducting research with the more fundamental conceptual discussions around research -- the Bildung of the researcher. The book…

Critical theory and critical research are undeniably useful for revealing oppressive social structures and challenging the status quo in the realm of grand theory; yet, they are also useful for creating knowledge structures when academics deploy them on the ground. This article explores how critical theory and critical research can be used to…

It is often assumed that graduating engineering students readily envision what it means to be an engineer and what type of work they will be doing as engineers in the future. How can one know if this is true? This research begins to answer these questions by aiming to understand undergraduate engineering students' perceptions of themselves as…

This paper examines the evolutionary path of the university and its impact on the quality of education it provides to people, industry and society. The authors first analyse the (Kantian) paradigm of reason, the (German Idealists') paradigm of culture and the current dominant techno-bureaucratic paradigm of excellence. They then argue that the…

From 1988 through 1995 a group of researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education collaborated with teachers from nearby schools on research to address questions about teaching for understanding and linking research with practice. They describe the theoretical foundations underlying the Teaching for Understanding framework, the process and…

A study with 85 second graders found that naming speed accounted for a sizable amount of unique variance in reading with vocabulary and phonemic awareness partialled out. Marked difficulties on reading tasks were seen in students with both slow naming speed and low phonemic awareness, thus supporting the double deficit hypothesis of reading…

Considerable evidence has been found to support the hypothesis that actors' and observers' attributions diverge. It is also becoming clear that this divergence is not the result of a single process, but is the result of factors which co-occur and differentiate actors from observers. Observers' beliefs about their similarity to actors were…

Administrative scientists superimpose analytic frameworks on their observations when trying to make knowledge meaningful. The generation of knowledge should be seen as an essentially interpretive and subjective activity. An awareness of this fact may encourage a view of scientific progress that is reinforced by the social context in which research…

A series of six experiments compares young children's competence in attributing absence of knowledge (ignorance) to their competence in attributing a false belief to the other. (HOD)

Data from 44 boys and 39 girls of 27-63 months of age indicated that children's gender schematization and other cognitive gender schema factors were significantly associated with accuracy in attributing gender-role stereotypes to males and females. (RH)

The article reports research supporting a view which sees learning disabilities as resulting from the interplay between a poorly elaborated knowledge base (especially in language related domains), the biologically determined efficiencies of such processes as encoding, and the physical and social meaning attached to performance (i.e. the context).…

Word association techniques were used to examine the growth of biological knowledge over a period of years, from fourth-grade to college students. Results were analyzed by classifying stimulus-response word pairs according to the nature of the relationship between the words in each pair. Three hypotheses were tested: (1) the proportion of enactive…

Beginning educational researchers are advised to do the following: (1) choose a research focus with reference to events in the real world of education; (2) augment research with products and services to bring about improvements in educational practice; and (3) find an honest critic to review research work. (SLD)

This essay, the concluding section of a larger study, examines the present state of cognitive science and instructional theory as reflected in the study's earlier chapters. Cognitive analyses of tasks are reported in the broad domain of language comprehension and production (e.g., understanding, composing, and answering questions about texts). The…

Studied a limited number of students exposed to teaching materials and strategies (developed from a cognitive perspective on learning), such that their impact would be monitored to determine how the learners constructed new knowledge frameworks as teaching proceeded. Includes background information, comparisons of teacher's intentions and…