The distinguished Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter possessed a scholarly imagination unusually open to fresh approaches to illuminating the past. In the seven years that separated the publications of "American Political Tradition" (1948) and "The Age of Reform" (1955), Hofstadter absorbed new intellectual…

Organisational constructs (e.g. job satisfaction) are at least partially perceptual or latent and the constructs and theories are themselves cultural inventions. People's perceptions, beliefs and attitudes are undoubtedly embedded in the "mental programming" of culture (Hofstede, 1980). Hofstede (1993: 81) notes that much of the academic field of…

This article describes how preservice teachers accomplish and write up action research projects as part of their teacher preparation at one university in the United States. The paper is divided into four major sections. In the first section, the instructor describes how teacher research is introduced to teacher education students and how they are…

This paper aims to extend our understanding of what it means to be a language teacher by examining ways in which language teachers are seen to be different to teachers of other subjects. Language teachers' distinctiveness was defined by over 200 practising and prospective language teachers from a range of contexts, and the analysis also included…

This paper evaluates the actual use of a course Website by graduate social work students. The study utilized data mining techniques to discover meaningful trends by using the data from server logs. The course Website was accessed 24,730 times by all 49 graduate students during a semester. The students utilized the course Website 23 hours a day, 7…

Clinical practice and research are generally taught separately in Master of Social Work programs by faculty with distinct areas of expertise. This paper discusses the teaching of single-subject design research methodology by clinical faculty, in the clinical practice class. Examples from student papers demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating…

This article presents a study that aims at constructing a teaching framework for software development methods in higher education. The research field is a capstone project-based course, offered by the Technion's Department of Computer Science, in which Extreme Programming is introduced. The research paradigm is an Action Research that involves…

In leadership education, developing a tolerance for ambiguity is a key element in preparing students for success in the fast-paced and often chaotic business world. In this article, the author presents an approach that draws on Boyer's framework for scholarship, incorporates experiential education principles, and adopts action research…

The authors contest a politician's claim that the National Numeracy Strategy (NNS) in English primary schools has been an undisputed success with no contribution from educational researchers. First, the key role of researchers and research in the development of the NNS is outlined. Then there is a description of the Leverhulme Numeracy Research…

The purpose of this study was to identify misconceptions concerning chemical equilibrium concepts and to investigate the effectiveness of instruction based on the constructivist approach over traditional instruction on 10th grade students' understanding of chemical equilibrium concepts. The subjects of this study consisted of 71 10th grade…

This article reports on the conduct and results of a randomised controlled trial to test the effectiveness of a teacher-led intervention to improve teenagers' knowledge of emergency contraception. The trial was successfully conducted in 24 mixed-sex state secondary schools in Avon, South-west England. The intervention was popular with both…

The authors trace the development of the King's Formative Assessment Programme from its origins in diagnostic testing in the 1970s, through the graded assessment movement in the 1980s, to the present day. In doing so, they discuss the practical issues involved in reviewing research and outline the strategies that were used to try to communicate…

In this study we analyse how the experiences of chemistry teachers on the use of a Microcomputer-Based Laboratory (MBL), gathered by a Likert-scale instrument, can be utilized to develop the new package "Empirica 2000." We used exploratory factor analysis to identify the essential features in a large set of questionnaire data to see how…

Few evidence-based instructional practices achieve large-scale use, often remaining only in the schools directly involved in their development. Research on scaling up effective educational practice often lacks sensitive measures of the practice's implementation and the required research protocol. This article describes how we used rate of…

An action research project, managed by a graduate student, resulted in the development of an academic website as an effective internal and external communication tool. The main focus of the investigation was to uncover the tacit knowledge held by staff in the Department of Management Communication through a series of in-depth interviews, a focus…