For the purpose of reflective analysis, this article, which employs narrative inquiry as a research methodology, combines two "crossing the boundaries" dilemmas I experienced over the course of a decade. While the dilemmas relate to different issues that emerged in my career (standardized testing as a K-12 teacher and the formal…

Many of the serious public health problems affecting U.S. citizens and the global community can be addressed by prevention science and practice. Instructive standards or guidance for prevention work have largely been missing from the professional literature. Despite empirical evidence that prevention works, the epidemiological literature continues…

"Don't tell me no; I tell you no!" is a classic example of a frustrated mother reprimanding her toddler. Certainly, other parents and even teachers of young children experience and/or understand this sentiment as they pursue the slow process of teaching infants and toddlers self-control and self-regulation. This article illuminates how teachers…

"What happens to domain knowledge on its way into the school curriculum?" The article explores this question from a systems view of the knowledge transformation process. This process is not only bound to "contextual knowledge" about "social forces" but also to the school's own "educational knowledge"…

Student assessment, in all its forms, is central to the educational process. In this paper in the series, "Bridging the Gap", I describe how assessment can be used as a powerful instrument for influencing how and what students learn and how and what instructors teach in a manner that is conducive to educationally sound curriculum change…

American democratic society is sustained through debate among its citizens. Four sets of value tensions--(1) law versus ethics, (2) private wealth versus common wealth, (3) freedom versus equality, and (4) unity versus diversity--are central in allowing citizens to address matters of public interest through debate. These value pairs are the…

This chapter describes the use of popular film and semiotics for the development of critical media literacy in a graduate-level education course entitled "Pop Culture as Pedagogy: The Role of Entertainment Media in Teaching for Critical Consciousness and Critical Media Literacy." The course focused on analysis of different forms of pop culture,…

This article explores the meaning of child-centeredness in Early Childhood Education (ECE), by shedding light on the nuanced tensions between teacher control and children's freedom. While ECE professionals advocate the importance of children's individual interests and needs in education, they diverge somewhat in their perspectives about the…

Any application of information and communication technology in education (ICTE) sits, at times uncomfortably, at the intersection of three key disciplines: technology, education and sociology (including reflexivity). To confuse matters, any specific study may need to take account of specific knowledge within subdisciplines, such as organisational…

Instructional design scholars have emphasized the development of theories and models more than the study of professional practice. Although both theoretical and practical knowledge are essential in a professional discipline, the field has not yet articulated the relationship between the two types of knowledge and how understanding this…

In the USA there is a contemporary discourse of crisis about the state of education and a parallel discourse that lays a large portion of the blame onto the poor quality of educational research. The solution offered is "scientific research." This article presents critiques of the core assumptions of the scientific research as secure argument.…

The discussion of the gap between theory and practice has a long tradition in educational psychology and especially in research on learning and instruction. Starting with a short analysis of more or less elaborated approaches focusing on this problem, a complex procedure called "integrative research approach", specialized in reducing the gap…

In the heated debate on the gap between educational research and practice, participants often defend single solutions based on monocausal problem analyses. This article aims to improve the quality of the debate by encouraging participants to take a many-sided perspective. To this purpose, we first reviewed the literature and developed an inventory…

In this article, the author explores the role of research in education. Unlike medicine, education is not--and likely cannot be--rooted in scientific traditions. It lacks an explicit knowledge base that professionals rely upon. Opinion can be as powerful as evidence; personal experience more relevant than research knowledge. Indeed research…

This article feeds into debate about the feasibility and usefulness of educational experiments by discussing methodological issues arising out of a study which sought causal links between teaching and learning of one aspect of French as a foreign language. The study involved two small-scale experiments which tested a hypothesis regarding the…