Researchers and practitioners both have important roles to play in the study and understanding of early childhood development. However, the cultures of the different professional fields can lead to a gap in what we know and what we do to promote healthy child development. The evidence-based practice movement in the early childhood field provides…

Research into the practice of academics serves to inform higher education development (HED) theory and interventions, and is important for the development of the professional knowledge of the HED practitioner. Through such research HED practitioners gain access to what in another context is referred to as "guilty knowledge". The complex ethical…

The goal of education and research in all disciplines is to develop critical thinking skills as a method for improving clinical decisionmaking. The emphasis on critical thinking is nothing new and can be traced back to ancient times when Socrates challenged his students to think about their knowledge, beliefs, and behaviors by interrogating them.…

In this contribution, we discuss what it means to be a professional teacher with practical wisdom, and how practical wisdom is related to theory and experience. These questions are especially relevant as nowadays, in many countries, teacher education becomes more school-based. Building on theories on the functioning of the human mind in general,…

This article explores teacher training by the alternation of classroom work and work analysis using an approach based on a social conception of meaning and action. The advantage of this approach is that it allows the development of professional activity in preservice teachers (PTs) to be assessed by tracking how the reflective tools acquired in…

In this paper we report the results from a major UK government-funded project, started in 2005, to review statistics and handling data within the school mathematics curriculum for students up to age 16. As a result of a survey of teachers we developed new teaching materials that explicitly use a problem-solving approach for the teaching and…

A charrette (pronounced shuh-ret) is a collaborative planning process that harnesses the talents and energies of all interested parties to create a shared vision and a feasible plan for implementation. The charrette consists of an intense period of design activity where variables are clarified, reasonable limits established and collective…

"What does it mean to "find home"?" and "How might an experience and understanding of "home" be represented and enhanced by the art form of collage?" These are the two questions that have been guiding my work and life for several years, in ways this article describes. I outline some basics of my initial…

This article provides a situated perspective on the person-centered classroom management practices described in this issue, in order to highlight the special contribution these practices make to sustaining meaningful student engagement in classroom activity. Building on Paul Gump's efforts to conceptualize the classroom environment, the discussion…

Twenty-five years ago, armed with the courage of her convictions and a respectable collection of empirical evidence, the author articulated what she considered to be a compelling argument against the cosmetic use of multiple selection criteria as a guiding principle for identifying children and youth with high potential. To assess the current…

Business communication (BC) is a crucial aspect of management consulting. BC scholars have widely studied the relationship between BC and management consulting, including consulting by BC academics. A limited review of the studies of management consulting, including consulting done by business college academics, hereafter referred to simply as…

This study examined the mediating effect of career decision self-efficacy on the relationship between the Five-Factor Model of personality and the career commitment process (i.e., vocational commitment and the tendency to foreclose) in a sample of 785 Chinese graduate students. The multiple regression analyses showed that neuroticism and…

In the past decade, interest in the form of professional learning loosely described as coaching has exploded. This growing interest in coaching is likely fueled by educators' recognition that traditional one-shot approaches to professional development--where teachers hear about practices but do not receive follow-up support--are ineffective at…

A central dilemma in developmental psychology has been to combine general concepts with research of the individual child in all her complexity in everyday life activities. Psychologists such as Riegel, Bronfenbrenner, Burman, Morss, Hedegaard, and Walkerdine have criticized research approaches that study child development from a functional view.…

This Research Connections column describes the background to and the research base for the San Diego Unified School Districts' federally funded Striving Readers Project. The curriculum for the project was developed out of a longitudinal study into the literacy experiences of secondary students in New Zealand and from exploratory work in San Diego…