This article argues that imaginative play can fulfil a valuable role in the development of reading among pre-school children. It uses Feuerstein's Mediated Learning Experience as a theoretical lens and defines the concepts related to imaginative play, focussing particularly on symbolic and dramatic play. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of…

Background: This article provides a qualitative account of four models of support for adults with intellectual disability in individual supported living (ISL) arrangements. Materials and Methods: Completion of the first 50 evaluations of 150 arrangements for the third phase of the ISL project provided the examples. Results: Four approaches are…

Educators and researchers are finding that students are more motivated and engaged when using mobile devices such as an iPad. Yet research describing powerful and effective iPad-mediated teaching and learning and how it supports the development of multiliteracies is limited. This article reports on a qualitative study that was designed to capture…

Disparate goals that learners might have in learning second or foreign language pronunciation and the scant classroom time that can be dedicated to teaching this target language subsystem dictate that learner autonomy is of vital importance in this case and adept use of pronunciation learning strategies (PLS) can be viewed as key to the…

Educational leadership plays a significant role in school success, through its effects on teachers' emotions, attitudes, and behaviours. However, the knowledge of how school leaders influence teachers' emotions is very limited. Most existing evidence focuses on general explanations that are not the result of controlled research designs, which is…

Enabling ability and growing talent is central to our professional work with young people. This paper is a 'think piece' that draws on findings from two research projects from the Aotearoa New Zealand context to highlight elements that appear to be central to enabling ability and growing talent in young people. A dialogic process was used to…

Autism is a global phenomenon. Yet, there is a dearth of knowledge of how it is understood and its impact in low-income countries. We examined parents' and professionals' understanding of autism in one low-income country, Nepal. We conducted focus groups and semi-structured interviews with parents of autistic and non-autistic children and…

Education researchers have established the value of dialogic, whole-class discussions across content areas. However, such discussions have been defined primarily in terms of questions that enable or constrain interactions among multiple students. Research remains to be done on whether and how the subject matter with which teacher and students…

The research suggests there is a gap in the peace studies and conflict resolution literature, with little representation or understanding of Chinese perspectives. In a project to address this gap, the researchers conducted interviews individually with 30 participants identified as "emerging leaders," who came from diverse universities…

The vignettes approach has emerged as a popular tool in quantitative and qualitative research. It has proven to be particularly effective in measuring sensitive topics. This paper focuses on the construction and validation process of questionnaire-based vignettes, which were used as an instrument to examine Omani secondary school girls' cultural…

This study examines how acceptable play was framed for a class of pre-Kindergarten children by their teacher and classroom aide. Using comic subjectivity theory [Zupancic, A. (2008). "The odd one in: On comedy." Cambridge: MIT Press], the author explores how children's playing at pretend violence (bad guy and pretend gun play) is…

Vignette design has been largely neglected in anchoring vignette studies. This study aimed to contribute to the science of vignette design by developing and evaluating vignettes for measuring vision in rural China. Cognitive interviews were conducted among 36 participants in a Chinese middle school. The respondents either directly evaluated vision…

Given the significant role that typically developing children play in the social lives of children with autism spectrum disorder, it is important to understand how they evaluate and reason about the inclusion/exclusion of children with autism spectrum disorder in social situations. The objective of this study is to determine elementary students'…

This paper stems from research in Australia examining pre-service teacher and mentor teacher experiences on the practicum. The paper focuses on findings from the research, highlighting the tendency among the pre-service teachers to either valorise or demonise their mentor teachers, reflective of what we describe, following Kristeva and Britzman,…

Decision-making in socioscientific issues (SSI) constitutes a real challenge for both biology teachers and learners. The assessment of students' performances in SSIs constitutes a problem, especially for biology teachers. The study at hand was conducted in Germany and uses a qualitative approach following the research procedures of grounded theory…