The challenge of research methods teaching is gaining attention among policy-makers keen to build social science research capacity and, critically, among educationalists keen to enhance the pedagogy. This paper addresses pedagogy, presenting a new conceptual-empirical typology of pedagogy for social science research methods teaching. Taking a…

From 2006 the British government strongly favoured synthetic phonics as the principal approach for the teaching of initial literacy in state-funded primary schools in England, and since 2010 has made it mandatory. In 2007-2013 just over 100 commercially published phonics schemes were available, and in that same period the government maintained a…

This study investigated whether changes can occur on indicators of teachers' professional identity (TPI) when teachers and students share representations about what happens in class during an academic term. TPI is a process of constant negotiation between the different I-positions of teachers at the personal, social and cultural levels. The main…

Beliefs influence how learners construe what they experience in the classroom and their learning behaviour. Understanding the nature of such beliefs is therefore important if teaching is to be as effective and responsive as possible. This paper reports the representations of young learners' beliefs about foreign language learning as identified…

Developments within education, psychology and the neurosciences have shed a great deal of light on how we learn while, at the same time, confirming for us all that learning is a profoundly complex process and far from understood. Against this background, and in this position article, we consider the recent rise in interest in the concept of…