Increasing availability of funds for development, design, and evaluation of alternative learning environments has challenged educational researchers to develop and validate innovative and effective interventions. The focus on accountability has resulted in an accelerated effort to record events, activities, and participation in substantive ways…

In this commentary, I summarize my own research with colleagues to affirm Dr. Gersten's call for considering design experiments prior to conducting intervention research. I describe how design experiments not only can inform teaching and the learning of innovative approaches, but also hold the promise of effectively bridging the…

In this paper the process of approaching three different early childhood settings with the same consent forms is discussed. In each setting ethical procedures were viewed differently. This formed a journey of discovery and provided an opportunity to reconceptualise the ethical process. While it is always the responsibility of the researcher to…

This study explores in an innovative manner the notion of resilience in a group of immigrant students. Structured interviews were used to explore resilience issues with immigrant students enrolled in university. Two interviewers collected and recorded data together, but conducted separate and independent analyses to explore differences in results…

The research was motivated by an interest in improving the teaching of deaf children. It is important to identify what has been written about short-term memory and the deaf, and this was achieved through a literature search and review. An extensive survey was conducted to ascertain what knowledge existing teachers of the deaf have about short-term…

Action research is one of the relevant methodologies for addressing research questions and issues in middle grades education. Accounting for nearly 20% of published middle grades research studies (Hough, 2003), action research has emerged as an important and appropriate research method. In addition to reviewing the historical context, this article…

This article outlines how a group of primary school teachers from a cluster of nine schools in a networked learning community enquired into their classroom teaching. The teachers each identified an area of practice that they were developing in their classroom and wanted to evaluate, such as the benefits of pupils working in teams, or the creation…

Objective: Given the present emphasis on accountability and maintaining quality, the objective of this study was to develop, apply, and assess the reliability of a fidelity rating instrument for consumer-operated services--a promising model, but one for which fidelity criteria are not yet established. Method: Based on observations, documents, and…

In investigations of the second-language writing process the aim of interviews and questionnaires has often been to find shared difficulties among them. However, in practice some writers are more successful than others. The aim of this study is to examine how some writers succeed in mastering scientific discourse in English, in a non-English…

Sixteen Heads of Anglican and Uniting Church independent schools were asked to describe their experiences of providing leadership to religiosity in their schools. It was found that there was a common but strong ironic tension characterising how each of the affiliated Churches engaged with the religious culture of their schools. The authenticity of…

This article reports recent foraging for ideas in action research among the lives and intellects of Chinese society. It began and is reported as a personal journey, initially following the trail of the activist scholar Wang Yang-Ming. The method is a roam through some of the resources that have so far been discovered. The style is…

People with communication disabilities experience problems in accessing the justice system. In this article we describe the development of a multimedia package designed to train legal personnel to identify and reduce communication barriers to their services. The training package is being developed collaboratively by a diverse team that included…

This study, framed by social constructionism, retrospectively examines how faculty mentoring influenced the transformations of 10 female graduate students' relational selves and their professional identities as qualitative researchers and scholars. Participants reported that effective mentorships often resulted in collaboration on research…

The piece that follows had its first hearing as part of a symposium at the 1990 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Boston. Sigrun Gudmundsdottir and Grace Grant were at the podium, presenting their two narrative accounts of one schoolteacher's practice. The schoolteacher was present as well, through the medium of a…

This article describes an experiment, designed by Cindy Henk, manager of the Socolofsky Microscopy Center at Louisiana State University (LSU), that involved collecting and viewing microorganisms in the air-water interface. The experiment was participated by Leesville High School microbiology students. The students found that the air-water…