This report presents the main findings from New Zealand Council for Educational Research's (NZCER's) latest survey of secondary schools, conducted in July and August 2015. These surveys have been done every 3 years since 2003. They provide a comprehensive national picture of what is happening in New Zealand secondary schools, how things have…

This article argues that research on teacher preparation over the last 100 years can be understood in terms of the major questions that researchers examined. The analysis is guided by the framework of "research as historically situated social practice," which emphasizes that researchers' interests, commitments, and social experiences…

The paper describes the importance of graphicacy as a key communication tool in our everyday lives. The need to better understand the development of graphicacy and its use in the school curriculum is emphasised. The need for a new research tool is explained and the development of a new taxonomy of graphicacy is described. The use of this tool…

Universities around the world increasingly recognize the importance of offering high quality, high-engagement student learning experiences in their undergraduate and graduate programs. While the SoTL movement and literature has gained considerable recognition and momentum over the past two decades, much less inquiry has focused on institutional…

Young preschoolers rapidly acquire new information from social partners but do not learn efficiently from people on video. We trained parents to use Whitehurst's "dialogic reading" questioning techniques while watching educational television with their children. Eighty-one parents coviewed storybook videos with their 3-year-old children…

This article describes a study of teaching and learning in the first--or "foundation"--year of art college. As a multiple embedded case study informed by systems theory, the following cases are described: art colleges, foundation programs, professors, and students. The data were collected through surveys, interviews, classroom…

Secondary school teachers often complain that their students show a disengaged attitude in class. Students do not prepare for lessons, they show a passive attitude towards classroom activities and they have a limited awareness of their own learning process. Based on a pilot study, four homework assignments were designed, implemented, and evaluated…

This is an exploratory paper, drawing on the author's experiences as well as those of three other black lecturers in Higher Education (HE). Three interviews were carried out, asking the same five questions around themes of concern to the author. These are about the learning and teaching approaches used by these lecturers; their experiences of…

The study applies situated learning and communities of practice concepts to an ethnographic study of volunteer farm work. In contrast to a traditional conceptualization of education "for" leisure, participation in farm work activities is understood as a form of education taking place "in" a leisure context. Analysis reveals…

In this paper, I explain the components of "exhilarated learning," a model for effective classroom environments, and show how this model can be applied to the broader context of community-university engagement. I describe the following three dimensions: human connection, whole body engagement, and linking content to context; and I…

This article describes an approach to identifying, capturing, and implementing the active ingredients that account for the differences found when instructional and motivational research interventions are compared in empirical research. The goal of the article is to describe a research-to-practice model and questions that support the effective…

Do you feel bogged down by endless administrative tasks? Do you wish you could focus more on what truly matters--learning? "Learnership" provides both insight and solutions for moving past the distractions and becoming a learning leader. Cathy Toll illustrates this transformational process through activities and focused "learning conversations."…

Although professional collaboration has achieved popularity as an element of public school reform efforts, most research on its impact is qualitative in nature or limited to small case studies. This research sought to provide a quantitative examination of the relationships among levels of implementation of five characteristics of professional…

The article describes a theory-driven approach to meaningful learning in primary schools, based on the Vygotskian cultural-historical theory of human development and learning. This approach is elaborated into an educational concept called "developmental education" that is implemented in the Netherlands in many primary schools. In this…

The combination of classroom voting system (clicker) questions and peer instruction has been shown to increase student learning. While implementations in large lectures have been around for a while, mathematics has been increasingly using clickers in classes of a smaller size. In Fall 2008, I conducted an experiment to measure the effect of…