Childhood studies place emphasis on children's agency, their ability to understand their own world and act upon it. Children actively participate in meaningful social interactions in both formal and informal settings. Considering recent large-scale migration in Ireland, it is vital to understand how children interact in an increasingly diverse…

Streaming in secondary schools is not beneficial for improving student outcomes of education with vast amounts of educational research indicating that it does not improve academic results and increases inequity. Yet teachers often prefer working in streamed classes, and research shows that teachers mediate the effects of streaming on students.…

This paper examines the perception undergraduate students have, regarding the attributes they have developed in terms of transferable and communicative skills. The goal was to shed light on how undergraduate students, in the context of this research, perceive their graduate profile. This study was carried out at a university school of foreign…

The overall aim of this article is to analyse how a school's special needs unit in Sweden deals with children's agency and category work as they negotiate and categorise the problems that are encountered there. The data derive from an ethnographic study conducted in a Swedish special educational needs unit (SENU) attended by a group of five boys…

This study investigated the effects of multimodal tasks on critical reading ability and perceptions of Thai university students. To compare effects on critical reading ability, students were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups and assessed with pre- and post-critical reading tests. Furthermore, reflective journals and…

The emotional aspects of children's social relations have generally been marginalised in social science discourse. Children, who participated in the Australian segment of the Children's Understandings of Well-being (CUWB) project used various media to 'voice' the importance for their well-being of emotional relatedness with family, friends,…

Interacting with peers can be difficult for some students, due to their personality as well as to their learning styles. This paper shows how the Task-Based Approach (TBA) can be implemented and how digital resources can be used in language teaching and learning to enhance the students' experience and foster autonomy. To do so, I describe tasks I…

Changes in their brains, combined with a greater awareness of peers and events around them, make adolescence a key time for students to figure out who they are, what they aspire to be, and what they want to do in the world. This Alliance for Excellent Education report explores how human identity and self-regulation develop during adolescence and…

Research comparing the predictive power of parents' control and autonomy support in the United States and China has relied almost exclusively on children's reports. Such reports may lead to inaccurate conclusions if they do not reflect parents' practices to the same extent in the two countries. A total of 394 American and Chinese children…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the modern problems of federalism in the Russian Federation. In particular, the article examines the main provisions of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, which regulate the legal status of subjects in the Russian Federation, their rights and responsibilities, limits of autonomy and differentiation…

Authors and illustrators of children's literature bring to life characters and contexts that provide demonstrations of agency as well as resources upon which to build agency. Agency is considered here as making one's identity and perceptions visible and actively acknowledged by others to enhance and empower the personal, cultural, and social…

Numerous studies in the tradition of the self-determination theory (Deci and Ryan in "Can Psychol" 49(1):14-23, 2008) point out the significance of self-determined academic motivation and its relevance for learning processes and well-being. Whereas these results sketch a rather heterogeneous picture of the development of intrinsic and…

This conversation explores unschooling through theory and personal experience of Astra Taylor, who examines deschooling alongside the continua of Freedom/Oppression, Personal Control/Personal Autonomy, Solitude/Boredom, Privilege/Social Reproduction, Socialisation/Democracy. Taylor reveals complex relationships between the main strands of her…

Professional skepticism is an essential component of every successful audit. Research in psychology identified the trait professional skepticism as an enduring personality construct. The current study examines the relationship between the Big Five personality characteristics and accounting students' trait professional skepticism and their level of…

We report on a case study on pedagogical affordances of intercultural telecollaboration for authentic communication practice and competence development in the local foreign language. Focus is on spoken and written conversations involving pairs of secondary school pupils of different linguacultural backgrounds. Particular attention is given to…