This research note offers a critical reflection of the process of conducting qualitative research in the Irish primary school setting. The research discussed took place during the school year 2016-2017. It explored primary school children's understandings of citizenship and, the kinds of collective social actions they participated in as citizens…

Teachers' leadership plays a critical and central role in students' educational motivations. This indicates that, in the school context, a teacher's leadership can have both positive and negative impacts on students' educational motivation and performance. This article explores these assumptions, building on the path-goal theory, more specifically…

Teacher candidates earns to whom, why and where to teach theoretically through teaching profession knowledge lessons. And the skill to use the theoretical knowledge is learned through School Experience and Teaching Practice lessons in Turkey. In acquire these skills, the personal and professional characteristics of the practice teacher at the…

Behavioural teaching programmes that had long been used in Turkey began changing in 2005. In a significant development, new programmes based on constructivism have come to the fore. The adaptation of teachers in this transitional process and their internalization of this new approach have been of utmost importance for the success of the programme.…

This research is a study about the possibility to promote experimental design skills to elementary school pupils. Experimental design and the experiment process are foundational elements in current approaches to Science Teaching, as they provide learners with profound understanding about knowledge construction and science inquiry. The research was…

There is an increasing interest in the role of peers in facilitating the social interaction skills of pupils with autism spectrum disorder through peer-mediated interventions (PMI). Several reviews provide promising evidence for the effectiveness of this approach; however, there has been limited consideration of the range of outcome foci and…

Leadership studies on principal succession show that new principals are required to address numerous challenges when adapting to a new school context. This paper, on a study that used a qualitative research design, reports on the professional and organisational socialisation of a new principal in a South African primary school during the first…

Evaluating promisingness of ideas is an important but underdeveloped aspect of knowledge building. The goal of this research was to examine the extent to which Grade 3 students could make promisingness judgments to facilitate knowledge-building discourse. A Promising Ideas Tool was added to Knowledge Forum software to better support…

The purpose of this research study was to explore how parents in a large school district in Florida perceive the referral process leading to their children placement in Special Education. Participants in the study were 12 parents of special needs students whose children were, at the time of the study, receiving Special Education related services…

Poor mathematics performance in schools is both a national and an international concern. Teachers ought to be equipped with relevant subject matter knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge as one way to address this problem. However, no mathematics knowledge and practice standards have as yet been defined for the preparation of Foundation Phase…

Visuals and graphics have been used for communicating complex ideas since 1786 when William Playfair first invented the line graph and bar chart. Graphs and charts are useful for interpretation and making sense of data. For instance, John Snow's scatter plot helped pinpoint the source of a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and also changed…

There has been a call for effective professional learning to improve the quality of the science teaching of primary teachers in Australia. It seems from the literature that teaching science effectively is a challenging endeavour for primary teachers. Professional learning based on the instructional core framework is an emerging approach that has…

Parents and their roles in schools, public or private, often become the bed of heated discussions. "Parent involvement" is yesterday's buzz word; today, it is "family involvement." The phrase "parent involvement" connotes an image of parents being involved in their children's education. Family involvement is a more encompassing concept, embracing…

Formative assessment or assessment for learning is one of the most emphasized educational innovations around the world. Two of the common strategies that could be used in formative assessment are use of summative tests for formative purposes and comment only marking. We utilized these strategies in the form of formative quizzes in a general…

Set in the context of today's globalized approaches to curriculum reform, the purpose of this study was to compare the teaching and learning of science in Chinese and Australian Grade 6 classrooms. A conceptual framework based on notions of culture and socioeconomic status informed the research design. Case study participants were three teachers…