Development studies and comparative education have unusually wide terrains. Content analysis of selected journals reveals much that separates them, but areas of overlap are increasing. Unlike development studies, comparative education research remains mainly qualitative and is not mainly focussed upon low income countries. However,…

Reforms made to France's education system structures during the 1960s resulted in a repositioning of academic subjects within study plans. This article looks at three relatively similar subjects (physical sciences, natural sciences and physical education) and throws light on the arguments put forward to defend the purpose of each of them in the…

Recent curriculum changes in the educational system of Australia have resulted in allowing optional Engineering course work to count for university entrance for students choosing to apply to a university. In other educational systems, Engineering is playing an increasingly important role, either as a stand-alone subject or as part of an integrated…

There is considerable national interest in STEM initiatives, but yet there is little discussion concerning what STEM means in terms of a curriculum concept to be applied to school programming. This article focuses on STEM as a curriculum concept. First, STEM programming is discussed in terms of separate subjects, correlated and broad fields…

In this article, the authors report on an important symposium, Beyond BIO2010: Celebration and Opportunities, which was held at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C. on May 21-22, 2010. This symposium was organized to assess what progress has been made in addressing the challenges and recommendations in the National Research…

About 20 years ago, a number of Yukon schools took a different approach to outdoor education and outdoor pursuits. During the 1970s and 1980s, most Yukon high schools and junior high schools offered a course called Outdoor Education. These courses fit into the conventional blocks in a school timetable. Outdoor activities longer than these blocks…

There is increasing enthusiasm for teaching approaches that combine mathematics and biology. The call for integrating more quantitative work in biology education has led to new teaching tools that improve quantitative skills. Little is known, however, about whether increasing interdisciplinary work can lead to adverse effects, such as the…

The Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (ACHPER) includes Outdoor Education (OE) as a component of Physical Education (PE). Yet Outdoor Education is clearly thought of by many as a discrete discipline separate from Physical Education. Outdoor Education has a body of knowledge that differs from that of Physical…

This study investigates defining characteristics among the process standards of the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics and the 5 "Es" from the National Science Education Standards and the Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards. These characteristics are used to demonstrate similarities and differences between the…

This study compared one lesson across four U.S. "traditional" textbook series, two U.S. reform-based textbook series, and one Chinese mathematics textbook series in teaching the connection between multiplication and division. The results showed the differences across U.S. and Chinese lessons in both the teaching and the practice parts of…

This article reports the outcomes of the first 3 years of an ongoing participatory action research (PAR) project that brought together literacy and content-area teacher educators. The purpose of our collaboration was two-fold: (a) to develop shared understandings or theories related to literacy and the place of literacy instruction in content-area…

Many educational researchers across the United States have found that inquiry-based learning (IBL) supports the development of deep, meaningful content knowledge. However, integrating IBL into classroom practice has been challenging, in part because of contrasting conceptualizations and practices across educational fields. In this article, we (a)…

Over the last decade there is an intensive discussion within the Information Systems (IS) and Informatics community about the characteristics and identity of the discipline. Simultaneously with the discussion, there is an ongoing debate on essential skills and capabilities of IS and Business Informatics graduates as well as the profile of IS…

Integration or connectedness between faith and learning is a core aim of Protestant evangelical colleges and universities. It is pursued in a number of different ways in the academic programs of these institutions, even in commercially oriented courses that they offer, such as graphic design. However, the different ways that practical and…

Contemporary universities in the developed world face a plethora of increased--and changing--responsibilities. We are the global university, responsible for the production of worker citizens who will be "prepared" for an extraordinarily diverse set of challenges across all facets of their lives. Much of our research concentration in the academy…