Committed to being a charter school with a professional learning community that empowers teachers, New Mexico's South Valley Academy (SVA) staff transformed its state evaluation process into a practitioner action research process (Anderson, Herr, & Nihlen, 2007). While teachers self-diagnose growth needs and play active roles in improving…

The idea of using values as a means of guiding our research decisions and judging the validity of our claims of knowledge is well established in literature on the self-reflective genre of action research. Values in action research should always result in virtuous behaviour--to promote the general social good. However, ideas of what constitutes the…

At the University of the Free State (UFS) in South Africa, professional development is characterised by its focus on the advancement of scholarly teaching in the disciplines. Practices followed are informed by the scholarship of teaching and learning movement. Within learning communities, special attention is given to the motivational conditions…

This paper describes an action research project that investigated a range of activities to improve learners' mathematical communication skills. It also gives details of a subsequent case study that illustrates how technology can provide a means of overcoming some of the difficulties learners and tutors face in communicating about numeracy, while…

This paper reports an action research study aimed at understanding how to sensitize young English language learners towards caring for the environment. The pedagogical intervention in a 5th grade class consisted in the use of creative writing strategies to express learners' ideas. Three stages were followed: "recognizing facts,"…

In this paper we discuss perceptions of the benefits of learner-generated podcasts for supporting postgraduate engineering students in a mathematics-intensive course. The course under study had previously been highlighted as one in which students had struggled to attain knowledge that formed an essential underpinning to their degree programme.…

This article describes a relationship-based dance program, "Moving Parents and Children Together," and summarizes a 3-year study of teacher practice and parent-child interactions. Our work focuses on "relational engagement" in dance, which entails a person's basic motivation to connect plus a psychological investment in…

One of the means of transforming classroom experience is by conducting action research with students. This paper reports about the action research with university students. It has been carried out within a semester of the course "Methods of Upbringing". Its goal has been to improve evaluation of higher education teaching. Different forms…

The aim of this action research project was to investigate students' social preferences and pro-social interactions in a multiage, high school classroom in order to better understand how to group students to maximize learning and collaboration. According to many educational experts and previous inquiries, mixed-age learning groups introduce…

The purpose of this action research study was to utilize quantitative and qualitative data to measure the effects of Tier 2 and Tier 3 literacy interventions as they affect student achievement in the secondary school setting. The research questions addressed performance of students who were enrolled in Reading for Success as compared to a cohort…

The research studies human emotions through diverse methods and theoretical lenses. My intention in using this approach is to provide alternative ways of perceiving and interpreting emotions being experienced in the moment of arousal. Emotions are fundamental in human interactions because they are essential in the development of effective…

This article provides results from a three semester case study of the pedagogical efficacy of an innovative quality management field exercise. A series of direct and indirect measures were used to assess the extent to which the field exercise met a set of learning objectives. The results indicate that the assessment framework is useful in…

Human rights education (HRE) holds the potential for educators to begin an honest dialogue with students and to connect local issues with international struggles for human rights. However, HRE and other teaching approaches that build understanding of systems of power and oppression that lead to human rights violations are not widely embraced in…

The purpose of this research was to seek evidence of awareness of metacognitive processes and intertextuality in the reading comprehension of students in an adult basic education class. Its purpose was to interweave several strands of research investigation and theory to explain the reading and writing capabilities of a representative population…

When it comes to planning for instruction, many teachers may feel an overwhelming need to rely on prescribed curricular resources and when those are not available many teachers may feel lost. While several methods for improving instructional planning exist, research has shown that prioritizing standards, creating assessments aligned to those…