Individual differences have an influence on a wide range of education fields. These differences can range from organizing teaching environments to the techniques and strategies that the teacher uses. This study focused on individual differences of pre-service teachers and aimed to investigate the perceptions of Education Faculty students on…

This book explores the Capability Approach (CA) as an alternative critical lens through which to regard early childhood education (ECE) curricula. The CA framework is a counter narrative to the narrow instrumentalism that reduces education to a mere process of academic skills acquisition for a future workplace. Primarily the book draws on the…

Commentaries regarding appropriate methods for researching professional development have been a frequent topic in recent issues of "Educational Researcher" as well as other venues. In this article, the authors extend this discussion by observing that randomized trials of specific professional development programs have not enhanced our…

Minnesota Statutes 122A.40, Subdivision 8 and 122A.41, Subdivision 5, require that all districts evaluate teachers beginning in the 2014-2015 school year. In response to the statutes, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) convened a work group in early winter 2011 to consult with the MDE Commissioner to develop a state model for teacher…

Open courses have received a lot of attention in the last two years; however, the question of whether they serve learners has yet to be determined. This paper explores the challenges and potential in assessing the impact of open educational initiatives, particularly those that produce and share Open Educational Resources (OER). We use a…

These proceedings contain the papers of the 13th International Conference on Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA 2016), October 28-30, 2016, which has been organized by the International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS), co-organized by the University of Mannheim, Germany, and endorsed by the…

In designing the "Study of Schooling" research project, it was decided that seven regions in the United States would be studied, and for each region, "triples" would be the focus of the research. A "triple" consisted of a senior high school, a feeder junior high or middle school, and a feeder elementary school.…

The progress of a novice ethnographic researcher is traced from problems associated with a pilot study through the production of a final draft of her dissertation--an observational case study. Focus is on the data analysis process, the development of conceptual maps leading to an emergent grounded theory, and writing the dissertation. Research…

Concern over reports that North Carolina elementary school students performed below the national norms in reading achievement led to the establishment of a pilot program to improve reading skills in grades one through three. The Primary Reading Program was initiated in 117 classrooms in 40 schools throughout the state; 117 control classrooms from…