Background: In the contemporary recent education landscape, an inventive paradigm known as "STEAM" has emerged, which augments the erstwhile STEM framework by incorporating the dimension of "Art". STEAM endeavors to enhance students' capacities for creativity, innovation, and design thinking. Among the various forms of artistic…

In the wake of new museology and constructivist learning theories, the traditional unidirectional educational role of the museum has been contested and challenged. Museums have the potential to be progressive pedagogical sites and are an ideal terrain to explore educational theories and attitudes. Jacques Rancière, in his seminal book "The…

In 2012, I proposed the apprenticeship model as a promising catechetical model for church communities in which catechists might be hope generators, and the church community becomes a community of hope. This article argues that the original meaning of the apprenticeship model is challenged by an emphasis in youth ministry practices on the…

Inclusive special needs education is prominent on the international education agenda. Research on the characteristics of inclusive education for students with special needs and schools providing this is scarce, however. Our aim in the present study was therefore to further theory-building with regard to inclusive special needs education. On the…

In the current study differences between primary school teachers classified as high-performing in their implementation of cooperative learning (CL) in their classrooms and teachers who were less successful in implementing cooperative learning were investigated. The levels of implementation of cooperative learning differed significantly between…

What models of governance are effective in complex education systems? In all systems an increasing number of stakeholders are involved in designing, delivering, and monitoring education. Like our societies, education systems are increasingly diverse regarding students, teachers, and communities, as well as the values and identities we expect…

Studies on educational change efforts abound but generally limit themselves to post hoc explanations of failure and success. Such explanations are rarely turned into attempts at providing models for predicting change outcomes. The present study tries to develop such a model based on the teachers' impact analysis of a management-driven…

Marketing specialists have recently redefined the roles customers and enterprises play in the economy. Modern customers are connected, informed, mobile, educated and internationally oriented. They seek enterprises that empower them to co-construct personalised experiences. This view of the customer-enterprise relationship has a great impact on the…

In the project "Learning for Life" we developed a hermeneutical--communicative model for worldview education that answers the European challenges of worldview diversity and worldview illiteracy. We implemented the model in a participatory action research project at nine schools for primary education in the Netherlands and monitored the…

Over the years attempts have been made to standardize sign languages. This form of language planning has been tackled by a variety of agents, most notably teachers of Deaf students, social workers, government agencies, and occasionally groups of Deaf people themselves. Their efforts have most often involved the development of sign language books…

This article describes experiences with a qualitative research project into teachers' learning from innovating their own educational practices. Decades of New Public Management (NPM) in the Netherlands, with its top-down and businesslike approach to areas of public interest, obscured the learning and innovating capacity of teachers, teams, and…

This article focuses on analysing the effect of educational differentiation policies of OECD educational systems on socioeconomically disadvantaged students, based on data from PISA 2009. The analysis is conducted on the basis of a definition of two subgroups of disadvantaged students: those that achieve high scores, and those obtaining scores…

The notion of complexity--as in "education is a complex system"--has two different meanings. On the one hand, there is the epistemic connotation, with "Complex" meaning "difficult to understand, hard to control". On the other hand, complex has a technical meaning, referring to systems composed of many interacting…

In this article, different inspection models are compared in terms of their impact on school improvement and the mechanisms each of these models generates to have such an impact. Our theoretical framework was drawn from the programme theories of six countries' school inspection systems (i.e. the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Ireland, the province…

Educational effectiveness research (EER) has accumulated much knowledge in the areas of school effectiveness research (SER), teacher effectiveness research (TER) and school/system improvement research (SSIR). Yet many schools and educational systems are not making enough use of the material and their insights. The article reviews evidence of…