This research is an evaluation of a Key Stage 3 intervention, Sanctuary, from its inception, through its evolution across nine years. The research explores the dichotomy related to achievement and inclusion and the conflicts that emerge when poor behaviour is involved. Pupils were identified in each of the three key stage 3 Year groups using criteria. These identified pupils were taken out of mainstream school into the resource base for a three week intensive course aimed at improving their basic numeracy and literacy skills whilst still ensuring provision of the core curriculum. Their adapted curriculum also included strategies to manage behaviour and anger and opportunities to develop self esteem, empathy, resilience and nurturing. The first research question was to investigate if the intervention provision answered the needs of the identified pupils. This justification was based on a formative evaluation of available literature and research. The second research question looking at the impact of the intervention required a summative evaluative methodological approach using documentation, questionnaires and interviews. Teachers, peer members, parents, employers, external inspectors and the young people themselves recognised improvements commensurate with other similar research as a result of the intervention.

This research constitutes an evaluative case study of Specialist Leaders of Education (SLEs) deployed through one Teaching School Alliance (TSA) in the English West Midlands and their contribution to leadership development. While the Government purports that enactment of and engagement with the role will develop leadership capacity, the study explores SLE, recipient and head teacher perceptions across eleven primary schools as to whether this broad aim has been achieved and seeks to inform the research agenda at a time when a leadership recruitment shortage is anticipated. The study considers how leadership learning is both conceptualised and facilitated across deployments and whether or not 'professional growth' occurred. A new conceptualisation of professional growth is offered that synthesizes key tenets from the literature and themes emerging from the findings. This includes the notion of a transformed view aligned with greater 'role conceptualisation', socialisation experiences and a sense of belonging fostering a coherent 'leadership identity' and self belief leading to increased 'personal capacity'. Outcomes of the study suggest that professional growth in these aspects did occur for SLEs and their recipients through engagement with the SLE programme where successful matches were made. Modifications in order to best achieve the desired outcomes are also recommended.

This thesis is about learning strategies that are specifically taught, presented in instruction booklets and then learned, in order to perform verbal recall tasks. It is also about how learning strategies that are not specifically taught and in this thesis called 'representations' are used by individuals to work out problems. There are two parts to the thesis. The first part used wordlists and learning strategies to assist subjects in learning lists of words. The second part of the thesis used problems and no taught or instructed learning strategies, but asked the subjects to show their 'workings out' in answering the various problems. Four experiments are reported in the first part of the thesis. Subjects were aged 13 - 14 years in the first two experiments and 10 - 11years in the latter two experiments. The Cognitive Styles Analysis was only used in the fourth experiment. The words chosen in all the four experiments were familiar nouns and adjectives and selected from common categories including: food, mode of transport, and animals. The results of these experiments show that either being taught or learning the strategies from written instructions does not greatly influence subjects' list learning performance. Also, it is unclear from the literature if the learning of learning strategies in learning lists of words, has a long lasting effect on the learner. The second part of the thesis examined the 'workings out' of subjects after completing a variety of problems including: analytic reasoning, verbal reasoning, spatial, and mathematical word. This part of the thesis included two studies and in both the Cognitive Styles Analysis (Riding, 1991) was given. The subjects were postgraduates and undergraduates in experiments five and six, respectively. The data was analyzed in terms of not how many problems were correctly answered but how much representation and how many different types of representations were used in arriving at a solution to each problem The representations were categorised according to the number of 'characters',' lines', 'pictures' 'ideas' and 'letters' (number of characters used in total - the number of characters used in the answer) used in each problem The results showed that most subjects used representations in solving problems. They also showed that such factors as age and cognitive style had an influence on the type of representation used.

This research explores inter-professional supervision involving an educational psychologist supervising another professional and complements the recent guidelines on professional supervision produced by The Division of Educational and Child Psychology (DECP) (Dunsmuir and Leadbetter, 2010). The factors explored were purposes and boundaries of supervision; models of supervision; skills of the supervisor, including those that are distinctive to the profession of educational psychology; benefits and problems associated with supervision including the process of evaluation and ethical and legal issues pertaining to supervision. An interpretative epistemological stance was adopted. Ten semi-structured interviews were carried out with educational psychologists (supervisors) and other professionals (supervisees) recruited through purposive sampling. Interviews were transcribed orthographically and coded using thematic analysis. Findings suggest that inter-professional supervision was viewed positively. Supervision skills were recognised as a necessary pre-requisite but not necessarily distinctive to the profession of educational psychology. This research highlights the conflicting conceptualisations of supervision and the importance of contracting for increasing understanding of the supervision process, alerting stakeholders to important ethical and legal implications, and reconciling differences in expectations concerning the aims and functions of supervision.

This thesis documents an ethnographic study of teaching Mandarin in three educational contexts in the United Kingdom. The first context is a complementary school where the language is taught as a heritage language. The second context is an evening class which took place in a community centre in Birmingham where Mandarin is taught and learnt as a foreign language. The third context is a secondary school in London where students are learning Mandarin as a foreign language in order to obtain a GCSE. This thesis makes an original contribution by bringing together, within the same research agenda, three different contexts for teaching and learning of Mandarin. Although not a comparative study, this research highlights how context shapes learning for three very different groups of students. The analytical chapters describe how the different environments each sustain a variety of practices, beliefs and values in and around learning Mandarin which shape identity and pedagogy. The thesis is organised around the following themes: culture and intercultural understandings; multilingual identities; language ecology; and multilingual practices. Findings show the political and economic rise of China is imperative in understanding the local ecological order of classroom practices. Evidence shows the importance of establishing ‘small cultures’ in classrooms to engage students in intercultural questioning and understanding. The socially imposed identities of ethnicity along with affiliation to heritage language are investigated. The importance of negotiation is highlighted across the three contexts as young people are shown transforming identities which are presupposed by teachers. The researcher’s role is also investigated in this regard. Finally the use of multilingual pedagogies for teaching Mandarin are described with proficiency as an important element in determining the use of code-switching in the teaching of Mandarin. Several suggestions and recommendations for policies and practices are formulated at the end of the study which argue for pedagogic and linguistic flexibility.

There has been a significant increase in interest in distributed leadership among policy-makers, practitioners and researchers in educational leadership over the past decade. Most of the literature has focused on distributed leadership as a leadership approach and has paid little attention to its effects on student learning outcomes. This study explores the perceptions of headteachers, middle leaders and teachers about the effects of distributed leadership on teaching and learning. The study uses semi-structured interviews with four headteachers, six middle leaders and eight teachers from two primary and two secondary schools in the West Midlands region of England. From these semi-structured interviews with eighteen participants, the study captures their perceptions of distributed leadership: what it means to them, how it is practised in schools and the perceived effects on teaching and learning. The findings show that distributed leadership has the support of leaders and teachers. They perceived it to have a positive effect on teaching and learning and the majority of practitioners believe that distributed leadership contributes to improvement in student learning outcomes. The participants’ responses also reveal that distributed leadership is believed to contribute to effective school leadership and involvement in decision making. The study identifies two interrelated yet competing principal approaches to the practice of distributed leadership. First, responsibilities are devolved across the school through formal mechanisms in a top-down manner. Second, was the emergent approach where bottom up influences were operational. Whilst the majority of the literature on distributed leadership promotes the latter approach, findings from this study reveal that the former is predominant in terms of how distributed leadership is practised in schools.

The Institute of Public Administration (IPA) is the Irish national centre for development of best practice in public administration and management. The setting for this study is the information systems (IS) department of the IPA. In the time frame of this study the IPA undertook an Institute-wide re-appraisal of teaching and learning, including higher order thinking skills and the use of e-learning. The aim was to investigate the relationship between critical thinking and technology and the extent to which computer based tasks could support the development of higher order thinking skills. The research is best described as a small-scale case study in which 17 computer science student subjects participated. The two principal data collection methods used were authentic computer-based critical thinking tasks (COGITASKs) and online discussions (OLD). The COGITASK requires student teams to construct an artefact using authentic general purpose Hypermedia and Modelling tools. On completion of each COGITASK, each individual student records in an OnLine Discussion forum (OLD) a narrative account of their impressions of what they have learned. The COGITASK generates quantitative data on critical thinking performance, the OLD generates qualitative data about student perceptions of their performance on tasks. The data is analysed using exploratory data analysis and content analysis. The analysis is conducted within a theoretical framework that describes critical thinking as constructive, cognitive, metacognitive and knowledgebased. The research is situated in the natural, authentic context of the IPA classroom, since these tasks are an integral part of instruction on the computer science course. Findings indicated that although, overall, students performed well, across tasks they performed less well on some planning, analysis and application aspects requiring deep understanding and metacognition. However, by triangulating performance and perception data, tools did seem to enable development of skills by making visible certain effects. Eight such effects are discussed. Reflecting, the aim throughout to relate theory to practice the study concludes by translating findings into non-prescriptive, practical guidelines for (IPA) teachers.

In both developed and developing countries poor performance of head teachers is detrimental to school effectiveness, with consequent economic costs amounting to billions of dollars every year. These costs are perhaps particularly keenly felt in developing countries, where demand for a workforce that is proficient in globally relevant competencies is especially acute, but where the effective school leadership that can help to deliver this educated workforce is especially patchy. One of the contributing factors to this poor performance is a lack of structured leadership development programmes. This study, therefore, explores the factors pertinent to effective school leadership development programmes in a resource poor education system, taking Cameroon as its example. The study combines a review of the academic literature with field document analysis evidence, structured interviews with head teachers and teachers, and a Leadership and Management Development Questionnaire (LMDQ) study. The results in particular indicate that the central educational agencies, schools and school leaders recognized the importance of ensuring that central policies and support, schools’ internal policies, and their in-service development opportunities for aspiring head teachers, are closely aligned with international best practice, particularly through the establishment of a structured leadership development programme targeted at aspiring head teachers, and aimed at combining governance skills with a more global outlook.

This study is an example of design and development research involving the design and development of learning material using the Ten Steps to Complex Learning model or TSM. It seeks to answer the key question, what is the value of the TSM? It does this by asking: What is TSM?; How does TSM work?; Is TSM useful?; and What are the contexts that need to be considered in adapting TSM?. TSM is a prescriptive instructional design model comprises of ten design steps needed in designing instruction. The ten steps are the expansion from four design components; learning task; supportive information; procedural information; and part-task practice; that derived from the 4C/ID model. TSM emphasises designing instruction for complex learning that promotes transfer of learning. In order to explore TSM, the model was used in developing learning material for three different topics using computer-based instruction as a medium of instruction. The study involved three different contexts, meaning that a multiple case study approach was adopted. The cases covered different higher education institutions in Malaysia and involved Interface Design, Injection Moulding, and Web Programming. The three cases enabled an exploration of the value of TSM by reflecting on the experience of design and by the gathering of the perspectives of learners and lecturers on the learning materials. Each case involved a mixed method data collection procedure that comprises of interview with the lecturer who taught the subject; online survey (Case 1: 16 items, n=17 and 18 items, n=6; Case 2: 17 items, n=21; Case 3: 18 items, n=15); Facebook feedback (in Case 1), open-ended questions (in all cases); observation, and document analysis. Each case study was examined with direct reference to the TSM whereby the process of reflecting on action that build up the knowledge about TSM and how it works in practice were recorded in a design log. The mixed methods enabled data triangulation and provide an in-depth exploration of TSM. From the reflection on the three cases studies, it was found that, TSM is a procedural model and could be categorized as product-oriented model. TSM works by breaking down the competencies or complex skills into learning task and structuring the content of the subject matter. TSM also was found useful in terms of focusing on content and learning task but was weak in considering context. The study suggested TSM should be used flexibly and designers should consider the content and curriculum, placement of media and learner readiness, they should also be aware that design takes place in a wider ecological context. These findings provide the basis for a model of design. This study not just brings value to the field by describing the use of TSM but also raises wider issues about design in general. Design is not solely about following procedures but is shaped by social cultural context. Designers need to ask the right key questions of where and how the learning takes place as well as who the learners are.

This research examines adolescents’ perceptions of digital reading in the UK and China on the basis of their print and digital literacy practices in school and in out-of-school settings. The comparative perspective employed in this research helps to provide deep insights into the nature of reading literacy and literacy in the changing social and cultural contexts. A mixed methodological approach was employed to investigate how the students interpret digital reading. Multiple methods were chosen, including focus groups, a survey and in-depth individual interviews. Eight focus groups were conducted as a preliminary stage. The result of focus groups and the existing literature review helped to lay the foundation for the design of the subsequent questionnaire. 798 valid questionnaires in total were collected. Deeper insights into students’ perceptions were gleaned through the individual interviews. The three data collection methods therefore enabled both a breadth of evidence to be collected, in addition to an in-depth analysis of the views of a smaller number of students. The findings suggest that both the UK and Chinese students shared similar expanded notions of reading, which confirmed that reading is more than the ability to decode printed texts in relatively fixed space. All the students in this study claimed to use both printed and digital texts. However, the Chinese students were found to be in a more paper-based reading environment and they had more subject-based practices of reading. The students’ preferences for certain text formats were influenced by various factors and their choices of text formats were dependent on the nature of certain texts and reading purposes. The gender gaps of reading among the UK students were found to be larger than among their Chinese counterparts. Meanwhile, this study suggests that reading online is more complicated than print reading. A range of strategies that are unique to online reading comprehension are expected to deal with various challenges in order to have successful online reading comprehension. However, the findings suggest that the UK students might be more skilled in online reading than the Chinese students. According to the students’ claims, differences between the UK and Chinese students in terms of literacy practices, preferences for text formats, gender differences and online reading comprehension could be associated with the social and cultural situations. This research, as the first exploratory study which investigates adolescents’ perceptions of digital reading across the UK and China, has contributed substantial knowledge in an under-researched field. It enriches our understanding of the nature of literacy in different social and cultural contexts.