This report presents a holistic approach to understanding and comparing vocational education and training (VET) systems. The approach has been developed jointly by a group of interdisciplinary VET researchers over a 5-year period as part of Cedefop's research on the future of VET and has been reviewed several times. The framework introduces 50…

Many countries include core competencies in their educational curricula. The purpose of competencies is to ensure a holistic education that equips students with skills to flourish in the twenty-first century. Across the literature on this topic, however, there are limited studies that investigate how primary schools embed competencies into their…

Background: Numerous studies show that active and engaging classrooms help students learn and persist in college, but adoption of new teaching practices has been slow. Professional development programs encourage instructors to implement new teaching methods and change the status quo in STEM undergraduate teaching, and structured observations of…

Erduran and Dagher's (2014) account of the Family Resemblance Approach (FRA) to Nature of Science (NOS) is a relatively new framework that frames NOS in a holistic fashion, inclusive of cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional aspects. This approach has also been referred to as the "Reconceptualized Family Resemblance Approach to Nature…

The sociolinguistic context of language use contributes to individuals' linguistic knowledge. However, how it does so has yet to be fully conceptualised or quantitatively investigated within the language sciences. To meet this goal, a psychometrically sound evidence-based measure that captures important aspects of contextually influenced…

Under current test-driven educational accountability policies, there has been a debate about school effectiveness. As conventionally measured by test scores in academic subjects, school effectiveness is often limited and potentially biased. With increasing emphasis on preparing students with both cognitive and noncognitive competencies,…

In this article, I conduct a critical scrutiny of how best to frame "Teacher Professional Learning" (TPL) in a time of uncertainty, to what extent, contemporary mainstream literature provides a complete description of this construct and, if not, what might be missing, hidden, unintended or otherwise overlooked. I draw from critical…

McKinney (2018) has argued that for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to advance within a discipline, the integration of SoTL must be closely examined and opportunities for growth in SoTL must be recognized and discussed. To that end, this paper reflects on the degree to which SoTL is integrated into communication sciences and…

The higher education literature on feedback has generally explored spoken feedback delivered on a summative written assignment. In contrast, this study explores spoken feedback as part of the teacher-student dialogue in classroom interaction (i.e. feedback talk). Drawing on a discourse analysis approach we identified linguistic and rhetorical…

Iowa BIG is a system of high schools located in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in the United States which emerged from community rebuilding efforts following catastrophic flooding in the city. The aim of this case study is to highlight Iowa BIG's complexity by describing how it functions as a: (1) school system; (2) vision for student-centric learning; and…

The social change model is one of the most used leadership models at colleges and universities around the globe. With this article, we explore the social change model (SCM) as a framework for socially responsible leadership program design. We discuss the SCM, its history, and the evolution of this approach. Furthermore, we highlight critiques of…

Within secondary education, there has been an increase in online enrollment of students who are at risk of dropping out of high school and being economically disadvantaged. This qualitative study analyzed ten participants' interviews based on what motivates them in the educational setting. Within the findings, themes of engagement in the…

This brief is part of the Affirming Equity, Ensuring Inclusion, and Empowering Action initiative. This brief is focused on holistic review, a strategy in college admissions that assesses an applicant's unique experiences alongside a range of indicators that include grades, extra curriculars, environmental context, among other factors. For…

This research study investigated the experiences of community college leaders using the guided pathways model to increase student retention. As a conceptual framework, the study utilized Tinto's integration theory of student dropout behavior. While previous research has focused on understanding the guided pathways processes and stakeholders'…

Narrative inquiry is a type of qualitative research that explores human experiences through lived or told stories to understand a phenomenon. Narrative researchers collect data through spoken or written stories and life experiences of an individual (subject). The data is examined in chronological order to understand the meaning of the phenomenon…