This timely book describes the work of the School Improvement Network, a partnership in which university professors and graduate students collaborated with K-12 school leaders and teachers to design, implement, and assess schoolwide action research projects focused on long-term school improvement. Presenting a comprehensive model, this resource…

Although research identifies a plethora of evidence-based instructional practices, classroom teachers find research difficult to access and often of little relevance to classroom practice; therefore, they do not implement these practices. Bridging the gap between research and practice requires continued and mediated support as teachers translate…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate evidence for the use of web discussion in the assessment of work-based learning in practical nurse education. The paper seeks to investigate what kind of conclusions can be drawn from the students' learning and learning processes, especially from their ability to reflect by analysing web…

This article describes an action research at an alternative high school which explores drop-out prevention strategies with first-year students. Student retention is extremely challenging for alternative schools. Because their mission is to provide a second chance to students who could not succeed in a regular setting, those schools regularly must…

Reporting on the results of an action research study, this manuscript provides examples of strategies used to integrate technology into a content methods course. The study used reflective teaching of a social studies methods course at a major Southwestern university in 10 course sections over a four-semester period. In alignment with the research…

This is an action research project to test a null hypothesis, which states that the use of manipulative materials within the context of mathematics instruction will not yield a significant increase in student achievement. Based on the research, using manipulative materials should have a positive impact on student achievement. Allowing students to…

Combining classic articles that have been key markers in recent debates with new and influential material, this book addresses the problems involved in educational research and the issues surrounding its contribution to policymaking and practice. The authors examine the diverse approaches within qualitative research and address some of the key…

A small-scale action research project was carried out on students' feedback histories on one undergraduate module. Old grades and comment sheets were collected and analysed by staff for recurring advice to individual students on the target module. This advice was then synthesized to create simple individual learning plans for the students'…

Parent drug education is considered a key aspect of drug prevention. Effective communication acts as protective factor for drug misuse in young people. This study is a Participatory Action Research study of "Drugsbridge", a drug education programme that has an emphasis on facilitating intergenerational communication about drugs between parents and…

The authors implemented an action research project to help teacher education candidates to reflect upon, assess, and ultimately strengthen teacher candidate dispositions through the Reflective Dispositional Coaching Model. The teacher education faculty agreed that candidate dispositions should address four areas: (a) professionalism, (b)…

The aim of this paper is to outline a theoretical and methodological framework for the understanding, design and creation of teachers' collective capacity through the implementation of knowledge cities in educational institutions which are registered in the context of a fourth generation of Knowledge Management. The authors suggest four pillars on…

In this action research study, 24 preservice middle level educators participated in simulated interdisciplinary teams for a semester. The impact this authentic pedagogy had on preservice teachers' developing knowledge of middle school teaming is documented through student artifacts (e.g., journals, assignments), tape-recorded interviews, and field…

Based on action research of the Information Processing (IP) course at the bachelor programme HA/DOK at Copenhagen Business School, we investigate which barriers students experience when learning holistic systems development and why. HA/DOK has been developed to educate students who can facilitate between users and programmers and navigate within…

Collaborative approaches designed to increase writing productivity (amount written) as well as writing quality were implemented over a period of six months with a small group of 12 six-year-olds in a Primary School in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. The study demonstrated the positive nature of peer interactions with an increase in quality and…

This paper reports an action research case study in which a traditional lecture based, face to face "Network Management" course at the University of Lapland's Faculty of Social Sciences was developed into two different course versions resorting to case based teaching: a face to face version and an online version. In the face to face…