This study explores Saudi student teachers’ perceptions of formative assessment (FA). Recently, there has been a shift in Saudi Arabia towards a constructivist approach within education, which emphasises problem solving, analysis and research rather than memorisation and repetition. Despite these changes, FA, which is best utilised in a constructivist environment, has been overlooked. There are few studies on FA in the Arabian region, and there are no studies about student teachers’ perceptions of FA. Because FA is a new approach in Saudi Arabia, the researcher drew upon traditions of action research, in that FA was introduced by the researcher and discussed with the participants throughout the study. A purposive sample of eleven Saudi student teachers and their tutors participated in this study. Data was collected using a variety of instruments over a period of time. The process of data collection was in three stages: before, during and after school placement. Initial one-to-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with the student teachers before school placement. Thirty-three observations took place during school placement. After school placement, questionnaires and one-to-one semi-structured interviews were conducted with the student teachers, and interviews were also conducted with their tutors. Although the Saudi student teachers had been influenced by summative assessment, the main findings showed that they were enthusiastic about the idea of FA and they recommended implementing it in Saudi schools. The findings also indicated that the student teachers could learn about FA, and the researcher’s approach of connecting theory to practice through reflection seemed to be helpful in developing their knowledge about FA. The student teachers perceived that mixed abilities classrooms and time limitations — both time within lessons and the period of school placements — affected their practice of FA. The findings also suggested that in order to avoid what they seemed to identify as problematic FA techniques, the student teachers tended to focus on certain FA strategies.

This study investigates the attitudes, values and perceptions of early years practitioners, to question what factors cause them to remain in day nurseries when research indicates a general undervaluing of practitioner needs (Cameron, Owen, Moss 2001). The study sits within the broader context of retention at a time when practitioners are constantly affected by change in the sector. The passion of practitioners in the research is evident, so too is the exploitation of it. The importance of the investigation lies in recognising that raising the quality of provision through qualifications pays no regard to the emotional needs of early years practitioners. If, as this study suggests, some practitioners are stressed at work, this has the potential to affect colleagues and children. If the only time we pay heed is when allegations of malpractice surface, we will have to wait for more children and practitioners to suffer before anything is done to address the situation. The wellbeing of early years practitioners has been brought into question through this investigation. I suggest that the absence of professional wellbeing negates any attempt to recruit or retain early years practitioners to work in day nurseries. Those of us who are concerned with the welfare and education of children should focus for a moment on the welfare of practitioners who provide their education and care. Those who are able must be proactive in offering funded creative opportunities for reflective practice with the aims of assuring practitioners that we value them and care enough to help safeguard their wellbeing.

The main objective of this study is to explore the effect of one taught course, a Logo module, on Kuwaiti elementary mathematics student-teachers’ beliefs about Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Logo. The Logo module incorporated ICT, in particular the Logo programming language, as a cognitive tool, that supports the constructivist perspective for mathematics instruction. The Logo module comprised of 24-sessions (deducted from the hours of the Methods of Teaching Mathematics course) and was non-compulsory and non-credit bearing. It was developed and taught by the researcher during the Fall semester 2007 at the College of Basic Education in the State of Kuwait. The researcher was not employed by the College of Basic Education: his only relationship with the College was to conduct his research there. The intention of the module was to give student-teachers the opportunity to experiment with a powerful innovation in a practical mathematics instruction context, both as students and as teachers, thus, enable them to reflect on and reevaluate their beliefs about the nature of mathematics, the teaching and learning of mathematics, and using Logo as an ICT tool. The study explores how participation in the Logo module course may have influenced these beliefs and promoted more positive beliefs toward using ICT and in particular Logo programming language in their future mathematics classroom, and its potential to reform education and enhance students’ learning. The fact that Logo is not used yet in Kuwaiti schools for mathematics education is one of the drivers of this study. A mixed methodology was used, to explore mathematics student-teachers’ beliefs. Two instruments for collecting quantitative and qualitative data were used to explore student-teachers’ beliefs prior to and following their participation in the Logo module: 1. A beliefs questionnaire, administered to thirty-two (32) mathematics student-teachers as a pre- and post-test; 2. A Semi-structured interview, administered to six (6) student-teachers as a pre- and post-test. Specifically, data collected by these instruments, in this study, attempted to investigate and answer the following two key questions: 1. What are Kuwaiti mathematics student-teachers’ beliefs about mathematics teaching and learning and the impact of ICT? 2. What is the effect of using Logo in a mathematics education course on Kuwaiti mathematics student-teachers’ beliefs about Logo and the teaching of mathematics? Analysis of the results showed a strong change in beliefs in support of the use ICT in general and in particular the use of Logo in their future mathematics instruction, as well as toward using constructivist teaching pedagogies.

Infectious pessimism, widespread apathy, and volatile relationships: these describe the high school culture I unwittingly adopted as a first-time principal at Potsdam High School in a rural suburban town in New England. I conducted a three-year intensive self-study and participatory action research project to challenge the status quo definition of educational quality in American public high school as a statistical tool of ranking, separating students, and compliance. I sought through co-investigation with beneficiaries and stakeholders of public high school a life-affirming, need-fulfilling and performance-enhancing meaning of quality to challenge the status quo Based on action research, I created a new meta-model of the meaning of quality to guide my leadership called Transformational Quality Theory (TQT). The thesis describes how using TQT theory influenced my improvement as a school leader and educational theorist, the learning and transformation of other people, and the impact it had on improving the academic and social milieu of an impoverished American high school.

Introduction: The study was conducted to explore the gendering mediating students’ attitudes and experiences towards the formal academic curriculum at secondary school level in Libya. The problematic nature of the link between access, quality of schooling and gender equality in the curriculum in Libya is not sufficiently recognised. Methods: A total of 800 secondary students (ages 15-20), (males=389, females=411), who were from urban (n=360=45%) and rural (n=440=55%) localities of Libya completed a questionnaire designed to respond to a 5-point Likert scale of 19 items to elicit and to find out the key factors that influence students’ gendered perceptions, interests and characteristics of their future subject directions towards the aspects of school academic curriculum. 16 semi-structured interviews were also followed up to gain a deep understanding of the issues and enrich the validity of the questionnaire evidence. The statistical analysis software Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) was applied. The t-test statistic was used to compare the means and test the significance of any possible differences that existed between male and female responses. Results: These depicted a significant effect of gender differences on students’ perceptions, experiences and attitudes related to the aspects of the science curricula, science and technology courses. Females had significant higher attitudes towards science than males in urban school regionson the total scale. A significant gender difference was also depicted in the students’ perceptions of their abilities related to learning mathematics. Females showed more negative attitudes compared with males. Rural males had significant higher attitudes and perceptions towards mathematics, more than so urban males. The causes of these gender differences were found to be multifaceted. The study has identified students’ classroom experiences, culture, religion and societal factors as being influential in making females internalize the feeling that they are inferior to males. Discussion: The findings evidently showed a great desire for positive curriculum changes among participants’ effective amendments within the contents of the formal academic secondary school curriculum in major areas: Curriculum and Assessment; Teachers’ Attitudes and Classroom Environment; Teacher Training and Qualification; Teachers’ and Students’ Participation; and Gender Religion and Culture Influences. This study has made a contribution to the theoretical social and educational framework of curricular alignment by investigating the alignment between the non-testable elements of the curriculum which are related to the affective domain of Bloom’s taxonomy (includes the manner in which we deal with things emotionally, such as feelings, values, appreciation, enthusiasms, motivations, and attitudes) and shown that a tight alignment between these elements and classroom practice can help to minimize the role played by the implicit curriculum.

This study investigated attitudinal factors in the transition from face-to-face to e-learning in Tanzanian higher learning institutions. Five objectives guided the study: first, it examined teachers’ understanding of e-learning. Secondly, it examined teachers’ attitudes towards e-learning. Further it developed an e-learning attitude scale. It also explored barriers that can hinder the transition from face-to-face to e-learning and finally, it identified strategies that can optimise teachers’ and students’ involvement in e-learning. The Technology Acceptance Model (Davis 1986) guided this study and a Test of e-Learning Related Attitudes (TeLRA) scale was developed to assess the teachers’ attitudes. The study used a mixed methods approach under the umbrella of pragmatic philosophical assumption. It involved 269 respondents, obtained through stratified simple random sampling and purposive sampling. Questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and documentary review were used in data collection. All quantitative and qualitative data were respectively analysed using statistical package for the social sciences (SPSS) and thematic analysis. Chi-square, logistic regression and multiple regression were performed to examine the association of variables and their predictive power. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to derive empirical constructs from the developed TeLRA scale. The findings revealed that teaching experience and qualifications had a statistically significant contribution to teachers’ understanding of e-learning. Computer exposure and e-learning understanding had a statistically significant contribution to teachers’ attitudes toward e-learning. Poor infrastructure, financial constraints, inadequate support, lack of e-learning knowledge and teachers’ resistance to change also had a strong influence on the adoption of e-learning. The study also showed that teacher-to-students and students-to-content interactions as useful strategies to optimise teachers’ and students’ involvement in e-learning. Findings from this study have contributed to knowledge based on teachers’ understanding of, and attitudes towards e-learning in Tanzania and assisted in developing a factorial valid and reliable attitude scale measure. It is recommended that training in e-learning needs to be provided to teachers to widen their understanding of e-learning. There is also a need to strengthen factors associated with teachers’ positive attitudes towards e-learning and to address the barriers identified in this study.

This thesis seeks to develop an understanding of how Black males received and perceived education within the further education (FE) sector in England. Using phenomenological inquiry and narratives provided by the Black males I consider how they engaged with education in the post compulsory sector and their views regarding the quality of their educational experience while studying at college. I explore the encounters they experienced in terms of accessing the taught curriculum, their experiences of the institutional cultures in FE and the relationships they were able to form with college staff members. I suggest that race is an underlying feature of many of these encounters and influenced both the nature and the outcome of the encounter. I examine how Black males chose to interact with structures and systems and the mechanisms they developed to help them navigate education, including accessing staff, peer and family support and how these different systems were significant to their achievement within colleges. By using phenomenological inquiry, I present a challenge to some of the more popular presentations of Black males and demonstrate how some Black males use their own agency to promote success within education. The main ethnographic work for this inquiry was completed in two, medium-sized, general FE colleges in the east Midlands over a period of fifteen months from October 2005 until December 2006 and employed multiple techniques including observation, focus groups, individual interviews and photographic techniques together with an analysis of numerical data of student achievement, to produce rich, contextualised, composite pictures of the educational journeys of Black males in FE within the two study colleges. Using the data assembled I review how education systems could be organised in order to provide Black males with a better chance of achieving academic success in education and how education systems need to respond to more effectively meet the needs of this group.

This study, conducted between 2006 and 2011, enquired into student perceptions of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and its assessment at aged 16. The prevailing orthodoxies amongst writers, commentators and educationalists are that the subject does not reflect the learning and use made by young people of technology. The voice of the learner, so often lauded in aspects of school democracy and in formative assessment, has not been heard in respect of the high-stakes assessment at the end of Key Stage (KS) 4 in schools in England. This research was a step in filling that void. Taking an interpretive phenomenological approach three phases of empirical data collection were used each building on the previous ones. To bring the student perception and voice to the fore a repertory grid analysis was initially used to elicit constructs of learning and assessment directly from the students. This was followed by a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews across a sample of state-funded schools in England. The use of a multiple-phase data collection allowed phenomena to be distilled with successively more depth at each phase. Three phenomena emerged as central to the students’ views. Firstly students identified ICT as a subject that was predominantly about their future lives. They equated what they were doing in school with their perceptions of the needs of future education, employment and as a tool for life. Secondly they, in common with many commentators, saw creativity and ICT as being intrinsically linked. Thirdly their views were dominated by the culture of the school in which they were studying. The institutional habitus gave an enculturation to their perceptions which coloured everything else. Thus they valued creative and open-ended activity in the use of technology, but only where that contributed to formal, in-school, learning.

The nature of this study was to gain an insight into the lives of pupils participating in integrated education in Northern Ireland. The research enquiry used an interpretive approach incorporating a Grounded Theory Strategy. This study has sought to model the perspectives of pupil’s attitudes and experiences encountered during their schooling, and how being educated in an inclusive integrated environment could promote cross community friendships within a post conflict society. The data was collected from two secondary integrated schools in Northern Ireland which were selected as case study sites. Theoretical sampling was a basic principle in collecting the data and a constant comparative methodology has been used to analyse the data and to theorise the results. The Grounded Theory analysis produced a core category subsequently named the Integrated Enhancement Experience (IEE) combining three mediating categories; interpersonal attachment, organisational commitment and surrounding interconnection categories. The knowledge contribution of the study revealed that friendship opportunity was a key component of shaping the pupil’s experience of integrated education. Theoretically, the study contributed to the body of integrated and psychological literature in making visible and modelling the views of pupils who are central to the whole concept of integrated education. It is suggested that integrated education in Northern Ireland can be a unique vehicle for change, that is an educational vehicle that does not go backwards but only forwards, left and right in its continuous development and expansion based on friendship.

This research sets out to explore the role of work-based learning within nonvocational under-graduate programmes. It is based on a longitudinal study focussing on three degree programmes within the School of Education at Nottingham Trent University. The focus for this research is on a short period of WBL experience, that is, a maximum of forty five days in length, organised by the student and approved and supported by Nottingham Trent University. The claim that I am making is the development of a framework for work-based learning for non-vocational undergraduate students within the School of Education at Nottingham Trent University, and the development of a living educational theory of practice. This is an original contribution to knowledge through investigating and improving my practice. A distinctive feature of my thesis is my explanation of how my ontological values of justice, respect and caring, have transformed into the living critical standards of judgement by which I wish my work to be evaluated. The research began as part of my journey as work-based learning co-ordinator to improve the quality of students’ experience, and ensure the curriculum underpinning the placement was appropriate. Action research was the chosen methodology. The key issues of this research have been to examine the difficulties experienced by stakeholders, namely students, mentors and colleagues, and then to develop, through yearly cycles, a framework for WBL whereby students have a quality experience. This framework has been tested, is sufficiently flexible to be appropriate in a variety of contexts, and incorporates new understandings about ideas and practices. The research evolved over a period of three cycles of action research during which time evaluation of evidence led to incremental and measurable enhancements to the student learning experience. Following the initial three cycles and the developed framework which is articulated in this thesis, in the true ethos of action research further cycles have emerged. These later cycles utilise Web 2.0 technology to support students while on work-based learning and are reported within this thesis. I have now started to share the framework both internally and externally to Nottingham Trent University.