The field of special education is recognized for conducting research designed to improve the quality of life for the children and families we serve. However, our field has been criticized for empirical approaches that are inconsistent with the values and beliefs we articulate as central to our scientific practice. As such, a shift in our research…

Several factors might affect outdoor play (individual and family aspects, neighbourhood environment, policy and socio-cultural factors). The Covid-19 lockdowns became a barrier to outdoor play and had a greater impact on children with disabilities. This study describes the outdoor activities and play and the contextual factors that affected them…

Purpose: Past research shows the Big-Fish-Little-Pond Effect (BFLPE; negative effect of school-average achievement on student-level academic self-concept) to generalize across countries. However, such evidence is largely limited to math and science. Given that reading self-concept is highly differentiated from math and science self-concepts and…

Community engagement in higher education has been promoted as critical to fulfilling higher education's responsibility to the public good through teaching, learning, and knowledge generation. Reciprocity and mutual benefit are key principles of community engagement that connote a two-way exchange of knowledge and outcomes. However, it is not clear…

The aim of this study is to determine the thoughts of science teachers about context-based learning and its use in science education. The research was conducted with the case study method of qualitative research. The study group of the research consists of 90 science teachers working in secondary schools. The teachers constituting the study group…

Faculty in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines face intensifying pressures in the 21st century, including multiple roles as educator, researcher, and entrepreneur. In addition to continuously increasing teaching and service expectations, faculty are engaged in substantive research that requires securing…

The purpose of this phenomenological investigation was to explore the lived experiences of rural high school counselors when providing career development services. Several key themes emerged, including (a) contextual factors, (b) direct services, (c) indirect services, (d) rewarding aspects, and (e) challenging aspects. The findings support…

Many dimensions of teacher working conditions influence both teacher and student outcomes; yet, analyses of schools' overall working conditions are challenged by high correlations among the dimensions. Our study overcame this challenge by applying latent profile analysis of Virginia teachers' perceptions of school leadership, instructional agency,…

Research on professional development (PD) in higher education settings is still scarce and little is known about how contextual factors influence PD of English as a foreign language (EFL) lecturers. Employing a transcendental phenomenological approach, this study seeks to extend research on this topic in order to understand how PD currently…

This study examined whether individual and collective moral disengagement (MD) in seventh grade were associated with bullying perpetration across seventh and eighth grade, and whether changes in individual and collective MD from seventh to eighth grade were associated with concomitant changes in individual-level bullying perpetration. In this…

The topic of the three chapters of this dissertation is empowering caregivers of children with or at high likelihood for autism to implement interventions in home settings with high fidelity to promote their child's social communication development. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the previous studies focused on caregiver-implemented early…

Over the decades, extensive research efforts have been directed towards classifying and evaluating motivational teaching behaviours. Recent calls in motivational research, however, have emphasised the need to investigate teachers' perspectives on how they develop effective motivational strategies so that implications for motivational teaching are…

We used the Stanford education data archive (SEDA) data to examine the heterogeneity among urban school districts in the United States. The SEDA 2.1 includes data sets on students' mathematics (Math) and English language arts (ELA) achievement from 2008 to 2014 at the district level. Growth mixture modeling was used to uncover the underlying…

One of the significant drawbacks of the English Language Teaching (ELT) Ph.D. programme in the Iranian ELT setting is the insufficiency of the research courses offered in the current curriculum, which do not adequately address the Ph.D. candidates needs, and this issue was not tackled in the field. Therefore, adopting a qualitative approach, this…

This study examines the role of secondary teacher candidates as student partners in research into undergraduate students' historical cognition while contextualizing documents. It highlights the unique role of teacher candidates as near-peer interviewers and change agents within higher education and secondary curricula. Through using decoding the…