In-service training as a form of continuing professional education (CPE) is important for social work professionals to maintain their skills and enhance their knowledge for publicly accountable practice. These goals are concerns in Mainland China, which has experienced rapid development in social work since economic reforms started in the early…

The Department for Education is running a three-year school exclusion trial, which started in autumn 2011 and continues until July 2014. The trial sees schools taking on responsibility for placing permanently excluded pupils in alternative provision and funding the placements from money devolved from.

Research has shown that collaborative learning is a very powerful methodology as it ensures interaction among students, humanises the learning process and has positive effects on academic achievement. An activity based on this approach can also benefit from the use of technology, making this task more appealing to our students today. The aim of…

Purpose: The past decade has seen considerable debate about how to best evaluate the efficacy of educational improvement initiatives, and members of the educational leadership research community have entered the debate with great energy. Throughout this debate, the use of randomized experiments has been a particularly contentious subject. This…

People of Hispanic origin, including monolingual Spanish speakers, have experienced difficulty identifying with a race category on U.S. demographic surveys. As part of a larger research effort by the U.S. Census Bureau to improve race and Hispanic origin questions for the 2020 Census, we tested experimental versions of race and Hispanic origin…

Empirical Education Inc. is the independent evaluator of WestEd's 2012 i3 Development grant for Internet-based Reading Apprenticeship Improving Science Education (iRAISE). This interim report provides an update on the progress of the randomized control trial (RCT) during the 2014-2015 school year. The RCT measures the impact of iRAISE on student…

Recognising and responding to behaviours and patterns of resistance is critical to the successful implementation of technology-enhanced learning strategies at higher education institutions. At institutional, academic and student levels, resistance manifests itself in a variety of forms, at best supporting a critical culture and at worst creating…

Districts expend a considerable amount of time, effort, and resources providing student performance data to teachers to inform instruction, and examining those data for organizational decision-making. Yet rarely, if ever, are these outcome data connected to what goes on in classrooms. In this experimental study, the author reports on the…

This article outlines a study conducted in Finland and Portugal into the reasons why International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Programme (DP) students choose particular Experimental Science (Group 4) subjects. Its findings suggest that interest, enjoyment, university course and career requirements have most influence on students' choices.…

Virginia Beach School System administrators and supervisors were personally interviewed about their reactions to the first year of the 45-15 plan where students attend school 45 days and break 15 days year round. Opinions were expressed about the increase and utilization of space, problems of maintaining proportional enrollments, rising time…

This booklet, the first in a series, reports the results of a year-long research project conducted in an experimental school associated with the Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh. Using a variety of techniques drawn from anthropology and psychology, the investigator elicited a cognitive map of school activities…

This document provides part of a final report to the Scottish Education Department on a study of student teachers' observations of and interviews with cooperating teachers. The purpose of the research was to help student teachers acquire an understanding of and control over teaching methods. The findings are from experiments with three samples of…

This article outlines the experiences of educators in three teacher education institutes in the USA, Australia and the UK as they experiment with carrying out programmes based on ideas of action research. The emphasis is on experiences with programmes of initial education for secondary school teachers. A descriptive case study aimed to find out…

Graduate students in a program evaluation class carried out small case-study evaluations, and examined the participants' reactions to the evaluation report. The programs included an experimental high school drama course, a high school music apprenticeship program, and a sixth grade computer course on problem solving. There were three phases of…