A case study approach was employed to investigate low-income families' aspirations for their children and their understandings of their children's developmental needs. Participants were four women whose children or grandchildren were enrolled in an urban early childhood program and were considered "at risk." Qualitative methods including…

Truly impacting teacher practices is a challenge for educational professional development (PD) providers. Typically, little attention is paid to the factors within the environment to which the educators return and how those factors will impact participants' ability to integrate what they have learned into their teaching practices. Even for…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to analyze the self initiated conversations held by school principals on web2.o platforms, such as blogs, through the lens of current leadership standards. The online writings of thirteen school principals were analyzed using grounded theory techniques (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) to elucidate emerging…

To support the review of the National Curriculum, the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) was commissioned by the Department for Education in the spring of 2011 to produce a report detailing curricular arrangements in a number of high-performing educational jurisdictions. The principal source of information for this report has been…

It is clear that the tragic events at Virginia Tech and other institutions of higher education (IHEs) have brought threat assessment to the forefront of higher education literature and increased public concern for campus safety. IHEs have a profound duty to learn from the Virginia Tech tragedy and to recognize their responsibility in providing a…

The purpose of this case study was to explore how participants of a communications workshop, "Action Dialogue," perceived their ability to engage in dialogue was improved and enhanced. The study was based on the following assumptions: (1) dialogue skills can be learned and people are able to learn these skills; (2) context and emotion influence…

Outdoor education in rural and agricultural surroundings offers many possibilities for learning and studying different school subjects as well as teaching. This study aims to explore the development of an educational rural camp school, Eco Learn, and to investigate pupils' expectations and experiences and teachers' experiences of carrying out the…

In 2009, the Australian Government introduced the Get Up and Grow (Commonwealth Government, 2009) guidelines for healthy eating and exercise in early childhood as one element of a range of initiatives aiming to curb childhood obesity, a problem affecting an increasing proportion of Australia children. Included in the policy recommendations are…

Numerous studies have identified causal factors for academic success. Factors vary from personal factors, such as cognitive style (McKenzie & Schweitzer, 2001), to social factors, such as culture differences (Aysan, Tanriogen, & Tanriogen, 1996). However, in these studies it is re-searchers who theorized the causal dimensions and…

This article builds on earlier research that defined and assessed technological competence among adolescents. It tracks students who took part in a measurements of technical abilities study fifteen years ago. The researcher had no previous knowledge of the test subjects' current employment status, but in favorable circumstances, these test…

The rise of the research intensive university has led some critics to argue that teaching has been discounted in favour of research, and thus the academy has "failed...their undergraduate populations" (Boyer Commission, 1998, p .5). This paper examines instructor perceptions of inquiry at an institution with a significant history of…

Building on previous research in which we provided an opportunity for female college athletes to construct their own photographic portrayals, this study explored young female athletes' perceptions of the college athlete photographs. Fifty-two girls participated in focus group interviews where they viewed and discussed the images. The young…

The present study investigated the use of lexical bundles in the academic writing of advanced Chinese EFL learners. A corpus of doctoral dissertations by the learners and a corpus of published journal articles by professional writers were collected for the study. Four-word lexical bundles in the two corpora were identified and analysed. Results…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of blogs as part of a formative assessment practice, to report how reflective peer-to-peer learning can be designed and provided in online higher education. Design/methodology/approach: The research relies on a qualitative approach. The empirical setting comprised an online higher education…

With the increasing frequency of young children with disabilities being included in early childhood classrooms, there is a critical need for early childhood educators and professionals to take an analytical look at the standards guiding early childhood education. By completing a qualitative document analysis of the developmentally appropriate…