Whereas some educational designers believe that students should learn new concepts through explorative problem solving within dedicated environments that constrain key parameters of their search and then support their progressive appropriation of empowering disciplinary forms, others are critical of the ultimate efficacy of this discovery-based…

Professional development is widely recognised as an essential path to promoting quality teaching and learning, but 'effective' professional development is dependent on core features such as duration, relevance and active teacher participation, all of which are central to teacher-centred research (Garet et al., 2001; Sanford, 2015; Scheerens,…

There are great opportunities and challenges to sharing large-scale mathematics classroom observation data. This Research Commentary describes the methodological opportunities and challenges and provides a specific example from a mathematics education research project to illustrate how the research questions and framework drove observational…

This article will provide ideas for teaching methods that aim to provide undergraduate students with the experience of working with mathematics in a business context. These teaching methods have been employed at a mainstream U.K. university in a final-year module, and employers have been heavily involved in designing and assessing learning…

Experimentation is the foundation of science and an important process for students to understand and experience. However, it can be difficult to teach some aspects of experimentation within the time and resource constraints of an academic semester. Interactive models can be a useful tool in bridging this gap. This freely accessible simulation…

Like many other universities of its kind, the University of Maine (UMaine) has a centralized body, the Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR), charged with engaging motivated students in independent learning and in the creation of new knowledge. UMaine furthermore has an honors college that is likewise committed to fostering undergraduate…

Early childhood research has long established that drawing is a central, and important activity for young children. Less common are investigations into the drawing activity of adults involved in early childhood. A team of adult early childhood researchers, with differing exposures and familiarities with drawing, experimented with intergenerational…

In this article the principle investigators of the various projects that comprise Aggie STEM at Texas A&M University discuss the impact and cross pollination of having graduate students from Turkey working and conducting their research as part of the multi-college Aggie STEM project. Turkish students have been engaged in instrumental roles…

This article interrogates notions of teacher "partnership with parents" within early childhood care and education settings in the context of Aotearoa (New Zealand). "Te Whariki," the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, clearly positions children's learning and development as being fostered when their families' cultures and…

This article reflects on the use of participative techniques with final-year secondary school students in one rural community in Western Kenya as an enabling tool for an outsider to both gain insider perspectives and develop a more insider role in that community by privileging and legitimating participant-driven data. Conclusions put forward the…

Collaborative research aimed at building local capacity is a complex, contested, time-consuming, and at the same time immensely rewarding experience. The clash of different research cultures, managerial approaches, and values involved in conducting and delivering research is inevitable. Collaborative research requires support structures on…

This article provides a case study of student experiences working as part of an interdisciplinary research team. A team of graduate-level students from social work, civil engineering, and computer science collaborated on the design of a mobile device application that captures data regarding how transportation disadvantage affects the lived…

This study examines the use of peer review in an undergraduate ecology programme, in which students write a research proposal as a grant application, prior to carrying out the research project. Using a theoretical feedback model, we compared teacher and student peer reviews in a double blind exercise, and show how students responded to feedback…

I argue for the continuing relevance of the Bourdieusian theoretical schema to research related to higher education. The paper discusses my use of Bourdieu in two research projects: an examination of the educational and occupational decision-making of final-year vocational A-level students; an analysis of the perceptions of final-year…

The project "Multimedia in science teaching: five years of research and teaching in Portugal" was successful in featuring the national research on multimedia in science education and in providing the community with a simple reference tool--a repository of open access scientific texts. The current work aims to describe the theoretical…