This article relates Korean parents’ stories of their children’s transition from primary to secondary school and identity struggles on entering secondary school. Mystified by the loss of a characteristically invitational culture at primary school, and without salient role models to provide ideas of who they might become, some students ...

The changing media landscape of the Internet has created a diverse environment for learning about global and national current events. Keeping up with the news is difficult and can result in students feeling overwhelmed by having to absorb so much information from so many sources. The argument is presented ...

This article explores the way in which a teacher educator worked with a group of undergraduate student teachers to use social sciences as a vehicle for developing three key competencies. While the study is primarily practitioner focused, it does include student perspectives of the learning process. The argument is ...

Whether and how to assess key competencies is a subject of debate and constitutes a main challenge in the implementation of key competencies within the New Zealand curriculum. The use of rubrics in criteria-based assessment may not take into consideration the situated and emergent nature of learning because the assessment ...

Informal formative assessment practices, which occur as part of the dialogic interactions happening in the everyday classroom, are not well understood by many teachers. The successful implementation of formative assessment practices is not widespread in school classrooms. This article examines one aspect of these dialogic interactions—namely, the use of teacher ...

Research has suggested that using early literacy data to inform instruction can prevent reading failure. However, little is known about how teachers learn to effectively link their instruction to student data. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate how first-grade teachers used early literacy student data to inform ...

Feedback on students’ written assignments has been deemed critical for improvement. Although teachers’ and students’ views on feedback have been examined, school leaders’ perceptions of what constitutes effective feedback remain unclear. This study investigates school leaders’ perceived quality of feedback that a teacher may provide, with teacher responses formulated based ...

This article introduces the Research, Analysis and Insight into National Standards (RAINS) project, a study of how six schools are enacting the National Standards introduced into New Zealand’s primary and intermediate schools from October 2009. The article provides some background to the National Standards and the RAINS research before concentrating ...

In Sweden, systematic reviews have prompted a strong government focus on implementing formative assessment in science and mathematics education. However, the intention behind this investment—to improve Sweden’s position in TIMSS and PISA appears to overlook the difficulty of putting research into practice. The purpose of this study is to explore ...