Undergraduate research projects in the life sciences encompass a broad range of studies, some of which may require the participation of human subjects or other activities which may raise ethical concerns. As universities are accountable for all projects undertaken under their auspices they must ensure that these projects adhere to legal…

Katharine Burn has a long-standing interest in history teachers' professional learning--not just the ways in which experienced teachers can support beginners, but how teachers at all stages of their career can be encouraged to go developing their practice. In this article, which draws on a number of small-scale research projects, she illustrates…

This paper provides an overview of the recursive process of initiating an action research project on literacy for students-at-risk in a Canadian urban elementary school. As this paper demonstrates, this requires development of a school-wide framework, which frames the action research project and desired outcomes, and a shared ownership of this…

During a one-semester-long research project with high school students, we deployed and gauged efficiency of two different reform teaching methods: reading, presenting, and questioning (RPQ) and experimenting and discussion (ED). In this paper we report on changes in students' attitudes and beliefs about physics and learning physics. We used the…

This article reports on the first phase of a research project in which we looked for the voices of young children, aged 5 to 6, in school. What do children experience in school? What do they see as the meaning of school? What is their motivation? Children have the right to be listened to. The question is which settings, under which circumstances,…

This article presents the results of a research project that investigated the extent to which the use of the historical episode of the Millikan-Ehrenhaft dispute over the existence of the elementary electric charge can improve students' conceptions of specific aspects of the Nature of Science (NOS). A teaching programme containing seven hourly…

Research supervisors' different ways of experiencing their supervision of doctoral students are analysed in terms of the students' questions and problems as they relate to the supervisor's research, and what consequences this connection, or non-connection, to the supervisor's research has for supervision and the role of supervisor. Thirty…

All research has limitations, for example, from paradigm, concept, theory, tradition, and discipline. In this article Lynda Stone describes three exemplars that are variations on limitation and are "extraordinary" in that they change what constitutes future research in each domain. Malcolm Gladwell's present day study of outliers makes a…

In the first tier of a multi-tier research project, U.S. faculty from the School of Teacher Education and the School of Library and Information Studies seek to create synergies between teacher education and library initiatives in order to understand the best ways to encourage collaboration between teachers and librarians. This article discusses…

This study explored the impact of the role of teacher-researchers on in-service teachers' professional development, as well as the reasons behind the lack of a teacher-as-researcher ethos in schools. In the study, teachers from four Hong Kong primary schools participated in a school-university collaborative research project that promotes…

The increasingly widespread use of iPads in higher education (HE) brings to the forefront questions about the contribution of these computer tablets towards teaching and learning. However, there is a noticeable gap of research on the instructional potential of iPads in HE. This paper describes the first stage of a research project on the use of…

To date, there is a paucity of research on graduate students' learning experiences in teacher education, and we also know little about what support they might need in their learning to become teacher educators. In order to fill this gap, this study draws on three graduate students' experiences, to explore how a PhD programme in a university in…

Quality Matters (QM) has been transforming established best practices and online education-based research into an applicable, scalable course level improvement process for the last decade. In this article, the authors describe QM as an ongoing design-based research project and an educational input for improving online education.

The article presents a particular case of undergraduate students working on subprojects within the framework of their supervisors' (the authors') research project during Autumn Semester 2012 and Spring Semester 2013. The article's purpose is to show that an institutionalized focus on students as "research learners" rather than merely…

This article seeks to evaluate universities against an ideal and finds the modern university gravely wanting in terms of its governance, staff and student relationships, and in the way it delivers its teaching and research. It is corrupted by power relationships, the lack of real accountability of SMTs, the failure to recognise the disciplines and…