The notion of complexity--as in "education is a complex system"--has two different meanings. On the one hand, there is the epistemic connotation, with "Complex" meaning "difficult to understand, hard to control". On the other hand, complex has a technical meaning, referring to systems composed of many interacting…

Growing emphasis on research output has spawned initiatives to enhance writing practices, often targeted at groups less familiar with academic research practices. This paper discusses a collaborative writing group project for higher education lecturers working in further education colleges. Participants had previously undertaken funded pedagogic…

Professors endorse a symbiotic relationship between research and teaching, but empirical evidence supporting this relationship is inconsistent. Many studies operationalized research and teaching too narrowly to detect the believed relationship. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 27 chemistry professors from a large…

This paper explores a traditional Islamic pedagogy known as "halaqah" as a potentially useful authentic research method and contributes to discourses about critical and indigenous research methodologies through an analysis of Islamization of Knowledge and other "critical indigenous" movements amongst Muslims. Islamic research…

The ASSISTments project is an ecosystem of a few hundred teachers, a platform, and researchers working together. Development professionals help train teachers and get teachers to participate in studies. The platform and these teachers help researchers (sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly) simply by using content the teacher selects. The…

The primary goal of this paper is to present the theoretical basis and application of two types of cognitive maps, concept map and mind map, and explain how they can be used by educational researchers in engineering design research. Cognitive mapping techniques can be useful to researchers as they study students' problem solving strategies…

Publications by teachers reporting results or case studies of school-based teacher inquiry activities benchmark their professional development by indicating they have a "stance of inquiry". Such papers also disseminate valuable knowledge to the education community for sharing. Essay or case writing has always been a part of school-based…

This article examines the way Finnish teacher education has changed over the last three decades. The role of teacher educators has become progressively more research-intensive, and teacher education currently faces a challenging dilemma. Not only is it dependent on the terms and conditions of conducting research, it must also address the need to…

This paper reports on the experiences of newcomers at the 36th Annual MERGA Conference. The paper applies Wenger's (1998) social learning theory to explore the kinds of feedback that might assist newcomers. Questionnaire responses to describe the experience of ten newcomers and interview responses from five of the ten are reported. The…

Hard disk drives are used in everyday life to store critical data. Although they are reliable, failure of a hard disk drive can be catastrophic, especially in applications like medicine, banking, air traffic control systems, missile guidance systems, computer numerical controlled machines, and more. The use of Self-Monitoring, Analysis and…

Education is a field of dreams, and so is educational research. Educators dream of schools that can improve the lives of students, solve social problems, and enrich the quality of life; educational researchers dream that their studies will enhance the effectiveness of schools in achieving these worthy goals. Both fields draw recruits who see the…

In many Western science systems, funding structures increasingly stimulate academic research to contribute to practical applications, but at the same time the rise of bibliometric performance assessments have strengthened the pressure on academics to conduct excellent basic research that can be published in scholarly literature. We analyze the…

This commentary discusses the emergence of youth development research and evaluation in the nonprofit arena over the past 10 to 15 years. Included in this discussion is the establishment of the context for youth development research in nonprofits, a brief description of key examples of research from three youth nonprofits that illustrate the…

This paper reviews eight articles on the implications of styles research contained in this special issue of "Learning and Individual Differences". Three of the papers present original research on topics such as the nature of visualizer cognitive style and intuitive cognitive style. Five of the papers offer reviews or analyses of styles research,…

The author wanted help in learning how to be more effective at supporting his students to learn how to conduct effective research so he interviewed several historians, artists, and educators about the ways in which they carry out their research, and how those researchers who are currently in classrooms help their students to learn and develop…