A core element of almost all educational improvement efforts is an intention to improve teacher practice in order to enhance student- and system-level outcomes. To this end, a range of strategies are deployed to facilitate teacher professional learning and development, with great investments of time, financial, and human resources. However, the…

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is defined as a scientifically-valid instructional framework for guiding the design of learning environments that support all students. The implementation of UDL often requires proactive considerations of learner variability and iterative instructional designs that meet emergent student needs in a learning…

Student ratings, a critical component in policy efforts to assess and improve teaching, are often collected using questionnaires, and inferences about teachers are then based on aggregated student survey responses. While considerable attention has been paid to the reliability and validity of these aggregates, much less attention has been paid to…

In this review, we focus on the museum activities and strategies that encourage and support children's learning. In order to provide insight into what is known about children's learning in museums, we examined study content, methodology and the resultant knowledge from the last decade of research. Because interactivity is increasingly seen as…

Sociocultural theories based on the work of Vygotsky have been increasingly influential in educational sciences. Developmental education (DE) is a pedagogical approach based on Vygotskian theory that has inspired primary schools in the Netherlands to change the learning environment innovatively in a comprehensive way. In this article, we focus on…

The present study shows how the mixed-methods approach can be used in capturing and organising learning environment (LE) characteristics for the participatory design of psychosocial and physical LEs involving learners. Theoretical constructs were tested and further elaborated on in the analysis of two similar educational design research studies:…

Early childhood centres are vibrant social communities where child and adult emotions are integral to learning. Previous research has focused on teaching practices that support children's social-emotional learning; fewer studies have attended to relevant centre-level factors, such as the emotional leadership practices of the centre director. The…

This article on secondary schools science laboratories in Portugal focuses on how school space functions as a pedagogical and political instrument by contributing to shape the conditions for teaching and learning dynamics. The article places the impact of changes to school layouts within the larger context of a public school renovation programme,…

The focus of this article is two-fold. First, it describes a model that can be used to guide the evaluation of teacher professional development. The model combines important components of existing models and incorporates the use of students' perceptions for examining teacher change. Second, the article reports the evaluation of a teacher…

This article develops a theoretical framework for studying how instructional space, teaching and learning are related in practice. It is argued that a school's physical design can contribute to the quality of the learning environment, but several non-architectural factors also determine how well a given facility serves as a setting for teaching…

Reports research on ways in which university academics design and incorporate computer-facilitated learning (CFL) environments into their courses. The study was based on archive material for 36 externally-funded technology-based projects. Projects were sorted into categories based on educational assumptions and practices, and use of educational…