This pilot study investigates the way that young students and teachers of a Dutch Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) secondary school subject Research and Design (R&D) reason about the concept of 'model'. The core of the Dutch Technasium secondary school course Research and Design curriculum (R&D is in Dutch called…

In the field of collaborative action research (CAR), the quality of the collaborative partnerships between university researchers and practitioners has received much attention. Most accounts focus on three areas: the question how to organise and optimise the encounter of these 'worlds' of scientific and practical reasoning; the professional…

This study reports on the development of second-year student teachers' knowledge of research, and the changes in their beliefs and attitude regarding research during an introductory course at an institute for primary teacher education. Questionnaires and concept maps were administered before and after the course. The results showed that student…

In this article, an attempt to identify further directions in research designs that researchers can use to contribute to the relevance of educational research findings, by including teachers' practicality issues, is presented. Sixty experienced teachers in secondary education read the reporting of modified experimental research findings about an…

The aim of this exploratory study is to develop a definition of conceptual understanding for teaching in international business. In international business, professionals face complex problems like what to produce, where to manufacture, which markets to target, and when to expand abroad. A clear definition of conceptual understanding needed to…

When visually impaired students attend regular high school, additional materials are necessary to help them understand physics concepts. The time for teachers to develop teaching materials for such students is scarce. Visually impaired students in regular high school physics classes often use a braille version of the physics textbook. Previously,…

This paper presents a mixed methods study in which 77 students and 3 teachers took part, that investigated the practice of Learning by Design (LBD). The study is part of a series of studies, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, that aims to improve student learning, teaching skills and teacher training. LBD uses the…

The acquisition of linguistic structures that require "perspective-taking" at the level of "message generation" is challenging. We investigate use of "progressive aspect" in L2 event encoding, using a sentence priming paradigm. We focus on Dutch, in which use of progressive aspect is optional. The progressive consists…

The six chapters of this theme issue consider three trends in educational effectiveness research: (1) integration of effectiveness phenomena at different levels, (2) a more model-driven approach than in the past, and (3) increased complexity of analysis tools and techniques to suit the new emphasis on process. (SLD)

Gifted secondary students not only solved problems better, faster, and with less assistance than average pupils, but also processed information in a different fashion. (MNS)

A case study of the period of repetitive babbling in one Dutch infant is reported. Repetitive babbling is seen as a systematic and continuous process, during which the child is applying certain strategies in order to form concepts concerning the possibilities of his or her articulatory apparatus. Strategies identified are: (1) variation…

Ninety-five secondary students were given textbook material in which two sequence variations (web and linear) were used in relation to the information processing strategies (serialist or holistic) demonstrated by the students. Users of the web-structured sequence scored higher on concept retention. (Author/JJD)

The purpose of this study was to compare traditional classification training for a set of abstract concepts with multiple-relations training consisting of inference practice and the use of a content diagram. To examine this, 200 undergraduate and graduate psychology students completed a Web-based tutorial covering the abstract concepts of a…