This report summarises Year 6 pupils' attainment in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) survey of 2016 in Northern Ireland and explores the context of that attainment. PIRLS is an international comparison study of reading at ages 9-10. PIRLS has a five-yearly cycle. Northern Ireland took part in PIRLS for the second time…

This summary accompanies the national report for Northern Ireland (Sizmur et al., 2017). It outlines the attainment of Year 6 pupils in Northern Ireland in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2016 survey and explores the context of that attainment. PIRLS is a study of reading at ages 9-10 and has a five-yearly cycle.…

This article discusses Estonian personal name signs. According to study there are four personal name sign categories in Estonian Sign Language: (1) arbitrary name signs; (2) descriptive name signs; (3) initialized-descriptive name signs; (4) loan/borrowed name signs. Mostly there are represented descriptive and borrowed personal name signs among…

Evidence-based practice requires that clinical decisions be based on evidence from rigorously controlled research studies. At this time, very few studies have directly examined the efficacy of clinical intervention methods for bilingual children. Clinical decisions for this population cannot, therefore, be based on the strongest forms of research…

While most studies on diverse organizations have been directed at business organizations, the academic sector has also become increasingly international and heterogeneous. Few large-scale studies have investigated multicultural academic departments and none of those have dealt with diversity and group processes. Therefore, a survey was directed…

This is an account of an ongoing project embedded within a university programme in music teacher education, designed and developed in the spirit of community music's embrace of musical exchanges within and between communities. The project is aimed at providing musicians-becoming-teachers with first-hand interaction with children and youth of the…

In recent years there has been increased attention to the importance of appropriate and relevant counseling interventions with culturally and religiously diverse populations. In accordance with the fact that Muslims rely on Qur'anic verses when answering the larger questions of life, "metaphor therapy" comes across as a technique that counselors…

This article presents a study that examined students' perceptions toward online practice and their developing attitudes toward the online learning process. The results indicated that both cultural background and personal qualities affect students' perceptions.

Within the UK and in many parts of the world, official accounts of what it is to make sense of religion are framed within a rhetorics of neutrality in which such study is premised upon the possibility of dispassionate engagement and analysis. This paper, which is largely theoretical in scope, explores both the affordances and the costs of such an…

This volume includes two sections of the 2019 NORDSCI international conference proceedings: (1) Education and Educational Research; and (2) Language and Linguistics. Education and Educational Research includes 11 papers covering scientific topics in the full spectrum of education, including history, sociology and economy of education, educational…

Since the inception of the L2 motivational self system (Dörnyei, 2005), which operationalises motivation as a function of learners' future identities, the field of L2 motivation has seen a growing interest in mental imagery. Numerous studies have examined the role of a future self-guide, that is, the ideal L2 self, and have confirmed it to be…

Through a self-study of teacher and teacher education practices, this article explores cultural discontinuities between Canadian teachers and Chinese students enrolled in Canadian offshore schools. The methodology of self-study provides a means to think about, understand and develop teachers' practice in contexts where intercultural diversity…

In this article the author presents the argument that racialized beliefs are always already present within the narratives of White people (Kant, 1996; Ricour, 1991), and in this case specifically teachers. The presence of a racially contextualized semantic move is evident when the person sharing is attempting to bond racially (Sleeter, 1990). The…

Background/Context: Although substantial evidence from the United States indicates that more qualified teachers are disproportionately concentrated among academically and economically advantaged children, little cross-national research has examined the distribution of teacher qualifications across schools and students. As a result, we know little…

In this study, we used the broaden-and-build theory and emotional response theory as the framework to examine the effects of instructors' positive emotions on student engagement and critical thinking in U.S. and Chinese classrooms, as well as the mediating role of students' positive emotions in their relationships. MANOVA results revealed no…