Australian educators teaching in the early years of formal schooling find themselves grappling with the dilemmas of preparing learners to sit performance-based assessments in later years and their sense of pedagogic responsibility towards designing competency-based assessment. Studies have explored this tension in the primary and middle years…

Previous research suggests that teachers' adoption of inquiry-based teaching is influenced by school culture's openness to creative solutions, with teachers' self-efficacy in inquiry-based teaching acting as a mediator. However, considering the potential impact of local educational and socio-cultural context on teachers' behavior, findings from…

Although previous belonging research has investigated social belonging sources, few studies have examined academic sources that include teacher and peer behaviors. Questions remain concerning the contextualization of belonging in specific disciplines and pedagogies. This study explores middle schoolers' science classroom belonging within two…

This article is a cross-border adventure in two senses of the term. Firstly, it is an adventure in co-authorship that exemplifies how Dewey conceptualises education, namely as a 'continuous reconstruction of experience'. Secondly, it explores the limitations of a restricted definition of 'professionalism', particularly when the term is applied in…

Social studies teachers often have a love-hate relationship with inquiry. The possibilities of a dynamic and engaging approach to learning labor against time constraints imposed by a content-heavy curriculum. In that scenario, how can professional development (PD) on inquiry inform educators and encourage skeptical teachers to implement this…

Bruce M. Shore's research contributions in gifted education have focused on three contexts that impact how giftedness is understood and the instructional environments that serve gifted learners' educational needs. This article describes these contributions and provides selected examples plus a more complete Supplemental Online bibliography. First,…

It is often asserted that to facilitate student engagement, encourage participation and create optimal learning environments, the classroom should be a safe space. In this paper, we explore the idea that 'safety' is at odds with the very nature of academic enquiry. Using data from a qualitative study with staff at a UK University, we illustrate…

Inquiry-based science education has been advocated as a goal in the South African school science curriculum. Despite this goal, the implementation of inquiry in this country has been largely fragmented due to contextual factors that exert an influence on its traction in the classroom. This phenomenologically orientated study reports on the…

There are many challenges associated with Inquiry-Based Practical Work (IBPW), scattered in the school and post-school natural sciences education research literature. The goal of the systematic review presented in this paper, was to gather the contextual teaching challenges in the said literature, and then to create a detailed multi-perspective…

The main objective of the study was to examine the implementation of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) in Malaysian secondary schools. The study was conducted by using quantitative method whereby a total of 971 principals, senior assistants and teachers were involved in the survey. The descriptive statistical analysis was employed to obtain…

Educational societies encountered rapid development in all fields of knowledge, assisted by the invention of new technologies and development of linguistic systems. Over time, researchers contribute to design well known instructional models such as traditional-based and inquiry-based models. However, the previous literature investigations showed…

This qualitative case study investigated why and how a teacher used his agency in curriculum-making. The study uses in-depth interviews, classroom observation, and teaching artefacts to understand the socio-cultural perspective on the interplay among agency, resources, schema, and structure. It finds that in this case, teacher agency was triggered…

Secondary school teachers in Tanzania have been attempting to implement the inquiry-based science curriculum since 2005. This study is descriptive and was designed within the realms of a Type IV case-study design (Yin, R. K. 2014. "Case study research: Design and methods" 5th ed. SAGE) to investigate their concerns in dealing with this…

This paper reports about the effect of an innovative, context-based science teaching and learning program on student intrinsic motivation. The intervention aimed at promoting Inquiry-Based Science Education (IBSE) in close collaboration with teachers throughout the academic year by developing and implementing socio-scientific, context-based,…

Even though studies have shown that the impact of professional development on inquiry-based learning (IBL) tends to remain limited when it fails to consider teachers' beliefs, there is little known about how these beliefs influence teachers' adoption of IBL. In answer to this issue, the present study offers a framework that explains teachers' use…