Educational research in Norway has experienced unprecedented structural expansion and cognitive shifts over the last two decades because of greater state investments and the strategic use of extensive and multi-year thematic programmes to fund research projects. Using a neo-institutionalist framework, we examine institutionalisation dynamics in…

This study examines physical education (PE) curriculum development in an elementary school. Our goal was to understand the daily construction of a curriculum. We sought to analyse the theoretical and methodological framework and documents that a PE teacher uses each day while putting a curriculum into practice (lived curriculum). The data…

The article illustrates how the South Africa-Netherlands Research Programme on Alternatives in Development (SANPAD), a doctoral research preparation programme for candidates on the African continent, evolved from an aid programme to an exemplary model of innovation, namely SANTRUST, an ownership-driven partnership within the framework of…

Recursive frame analysis (RFA) was used to conduct a single case investigation of Insoo Kim Berg's question utilization talk in a solution-focused brief therapy (SFBT) session. Due to the lack of process research that explores how SFBT questions facilitate change, the author investigated how Berg's solution language influenced a client to respond…

This paper examines the effectiveness of a professional development model (PDM) devised as part of a research project carried out to support early childhood professionals in Ireland in enhancing their pedagogy. The PDM was constructed on a socio-cultural theoretical framework whereby Vygotsky's zone of proximal development was applied in the…

Research on assessment in medical education has strongly focused on individual measurement instruments and their psychometric quality. Without detracting from the value of this research, such an approach is not sufficient to high quality assessment of competence as a whole. A programmatic approach is advocated which presupposes criteria for…

Since 2005 there has been an explosion of interest and debate about alternative futures for the doctorate in education. The authors take the debate from the abstract to the concrete by describing a signature pedagogy in doctoral education that combines theory, applied scholarship, and the wisdom of practice in new ways. They describe…

This case study draws attention to Pedro's story, a Grade 6 Latino teacher who, along with other grade 4-6 teachers, participated in a three-year professional development research project. By using data analyzed from multiple ethnographic interviews with teachers and students, and by drawing from the quantitative analyzes of concept map unit…

Higher education institutions (HEIs) worldwide have been undergoing significant levels of structural change for a number of years, ranging from minor re-alignments of roles and responsibilities to radical changes such as the creation of new roles and new models of operating. This article discusses some initial findings from a recent UK-focused…

Creativity, which has now entered the discourse in higher education alongside other agenda items such as enterprise, entrepreneurship and innovation, is an elusive and complex notion. It may evade the sort of definition, categorisation and compartmentalisation required to integrate it fully into the curriculum frameworks and assessment regimes…

This investigation tested the hypothesis that the probabilistic structure underlying psychotherapy interviews is Markovian. The "goodness of fit" of a first-order Markov chain model to actual therapy interviews was assessed using a x squared test of homogeneity, and by generating by Monte Carlo methods empirical sampling distributions of…

The effect of a model on subjects' willingness to engage in self-disclosure was examined in both laboratory and nonlaboratory settings. Disclosure levels did not differ in the two settings. Subjects not exposed to a model were more willing to engage in disclosure in the laboratory than in a nonlaboratory setting. (Author)

To replicate a study purporting to show positive effects of facilitative interpersonal functioning in a conditioning paradigm, 32 subjects were verbally conditioned within an experiment designed to vary preexperiment interview, facilitative level of the experimenter, and contingency of reinforcement. The present study failed to substantiate the…

This paper reports on the first stage of a research project still in progress aiming at identifying undergraduate students' difficulties and errors in solving linear algebra problems. Some students' difficulties related to very basic notions of vector space theory are shown and discussed with respect to both Balacheff's theory of conceptions and…

In 2001 a large-scale project, the "Breakthrough project", to develop teaching and learning was started at Lund Institute of Technology (LTH), Lund University, Sweden. The project has had a duration of 3 years and the aims of the project were to change the paradigm from teaching to learning and implement a sense of scholarship of…