Building on the research of National Board Certification and its effect on teacher quality, student achievement, and professional development, this dissertation seeks to explore the factors that influence teachers when it is time to renew their National Board Certification. Using a qualitative methodology, this study seeks to describe the process…

Objective: Evidence suggests that younger mothers engage in poorer health behaviours, resulting in increased cancer risk. We aimed to better understand the health behaviours of younger mothers and the factors that influence their lifestyle choices, in order to improve cancer prevention within this population. Methods: A multiple focus group,…

This paper presents data that consider ways in which young people experience the curriculum through the lens of subject examination syllabuses (for GCSEs), their associated assessment techniques and structures, and educational policies at national and school level concerning subject choice. Drawing upon an original qualitative dataset from a…

The Graduate Student Internships for Career Exploration (GSICE) program at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), offers structured training and hands-on experience through internships for a broad range of PhD-level careers. The GSICE program model was successfully replicated at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis). Here, we…

The article examines the scope for initiative and independent action that lies with school principals in Kazakhstan, with a particular focus on capacity-building approaches. The study is situated within a large collaborative project between three institutions: the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education, Nazarbayev University Graduate School…

For this focus group study we recruited from a population of 345 university students who had been informed of their poor academic performance in at least one course, but who had not utilized peer tutoring in the semester they received the warning, in order to determine if stigma played a role in their decision not to seek help. We learned from…

Although leaving statutory out-of-home care can be a challenging time for many young people, it is recognised that young people who have multiple or complex needs find this transition particularly difficult. This study aims to gain a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by care leavers who have complex needs, as well as to identify some of…

Raising awareness about sustainability is an urgent need and as such education for sustainability has gained relevancy for the last decades. It is acknowledged that science education can work as an important context for educating for sustainability. The goal of the present paper is to describe a role-playing activity about the construction of a…

Care in teaching has been widely investigated; however, little research has sought secondary pre-service teachers' understandings of caring and their potential responsibility to care for students. Accordingly, semi-structured interviews were employed with four focus groups, involving 12 (2 male and 10 female) participants. Data were analysed…

This study provides insight into preservice teachers' experiences with integrating technology into lessons with children who had mild learning disabilities. Participants included 14 junior early childhood education majors enrolled in a special education course with a fieldwork component. The researchers collected and analyzed lesson plans, journal…

For accreditation and programmatic decision making, education school administrators use inter-rater reliability analyses to judge credibility of student-teacher assessments. Although weak levels of agreement between university-appointed supervisors and cooperating teachers are usually interpreted to indicate that the process is not being…

The purpose of this single-site case study was to explore and describe traditional-age college juniors' reports of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997) regarding Career Planning (Barker & Kellen, 1998). More specifically, the career planning confidence levels of college juniors enrolled in a required career development course at a private business…

This study was conducted as a way to begin to fill a gap in the literature regarding young people and hobby pursuit. Through intensive exploratory research, the study sought to explicate the information behaviors of gifted young people related to their hobby pursuit. Focus groups and home visits were conducted and participants were given the…

The authors spend their days making decisions. Often, the consequences of their choices seemingly affect only a handful of stakeholders. Regrettably, when they rely on a scattershot approach to gauging stakeholders' opinions, they often find themselves off the mark. Perhaps, they give too much credence to "squeaky wheels" even though their views…

The purpose of this study is to examine how a school-based leadership team identifies and alters school conditions to foster the development of TLCs. Many educators, school leaders, and politicians have embraced teacher learning communities (TLCs) as a vehicle for school reform. Despite the considerable documentation of the capability for TLCs to…