Purpose: The study assesses pre-service teachers' attitudes, confidence in research and intentions to use research by comparing the effectiveness of practical versus theoretical training in research methods courses. Design/methodology/approach: This natural experiment examines the impact of the adaptations made to a research methods course for 848…

People with intellectual disabilities (IDs) have experienced involuntary and inhumane research practices. Consequently, researchers have shifted towards "excluding" those with IDs; caregivers, teachers, or peers compose study samples, dominating a space they "indirectly" experience. Researcher bias regarding intellectual…

Although often labelled obsolete and ethically dubious, twentieth-century behaviourist principles of learning have been central to the development of instructional technology and the design of modern learning environments. Using Andrew Pickering's philosophy, this article addresses behaviourism as a mangle of practice to highlight the conceptual…

While it is generally assumed that the aim of teacher evaluation is to "formatively" support teachers' professional development, research finds that teacher evaluation practices are predominantly "summative". This paper describes a Norwegian governmental policy experiment aiming to overcome this fallacy through a bargaining…

A core function of district leadership is providing instructional vision and support for school leaders and teachers. In this article, a Research-Practice Partnership focused on the improvement of elementary mathematics teaching and learning provides the context to study leadership development. We examine the process of one design team within the…

Given the worldwide spread of digital technology and the Internet throughout modern life, students' everyday education increasingly includes components or activities that use digital software or online resources. While more extensive data collection is certainly a novel and valuable feature of online environments, the authors place their attention…

Evaluation theories can be tested in various ways. One approach, the experimental analogue study, is described and illustrated in this article. The approach is presented as a method worthy to use in the pursuit of what Alkin and others have called descriptive evaluation theory. Drawing on analogue studies conducted by the first author, we…

This article provides a material enactment of educational theory to explore how we might do educational theory differently by defamiliarising the familiar. Theory is often assumed to be abstract, located solely in the realm of ideas and separate from practice. However, this view of theory emerges from a set of ontological and epistemological…

The achievement gaps between poor and more affluent students are persistent and chronic, as many students living in poverty are also members of more isolated communities where dialects such as African American English and Southern Vernacular English are often spoken. Non-mainstream dialect use is associated with weaker literacy achievement. The…

This chapter presents an introduction to design-based implementation research (DBIR). We describe the need for DBIR as a research approach that challenges educational researchers and practitioners to transcend traditional research/practice barriers to facilitate the design of educational interventions that are effective, sustainable, and scalable.…

Refutation texts have been shown to be effective at promoting knowledge revision. It has been suggested that refutation texts are most effective when the misconception and the correct information are co-activated and integrated with causal networks that support the correct information. We explored two augmentations to a refutation text that might…

Good theory development is grounded in empirical inquiry. In the context of educational evaluation, the development of empirically grounded theory has important benefits for the field and the practitioner. In particular, a shift to empirically derived theory will assist in advancing more systematic and contextually relevant evaluation practice, as…

A current challenge to public managers is the lack of a well-defined role. How can masters programmes prepare managers to live up to an undefined function? In this paper we argue that the lack of role description enhances the need for reflexivity and we show how it is done at Master in Educational Management (MEM). MEM provides the participating…

The practice of learning from multiple instances seems to allow children to learn about relational structure. The experiments reported here focused on two issues regarding relational learning from multiple instances: (a) what kind of perceptual situations foster such learning and (b) how particular object properties, such as complexity and…

A series of experiments on operant variability by Neuringer and colleagues (e.g., Neuringer, 1986, 2002; Page & Neuringer, 1985) have been repeatedly cited as showing that behavioral variability can be reinforced by making reinforcement contingent on it. They showed that the degree of variability in pigeons' eight-peck sequences, as measured by U…