Developing the Theory and Practice of Action Research: a South African case

The three tales told here concern my experiences of teaching educational action research. I first became involved in action research in 1973 while a doctoral student working on peace and cultural studies education curriculum in Northern Ireland where project teachers inquired into their own classrooms so as to facilitate the teaching of contentious social and political issues for mutual understanding across the religious–political divide. My three tales of teaching action research are rooted in three very different settings: one working with gypsy education projects in inner-city Dublin; the second as part of a small university–school collaborative in rural North Carolina, and the last a tale of a doctoral seminar at East Carolina University.     

Including children with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms: implications for pedagogy from a systematic review

This paper reports on the outcomes of the first in a series of three systematic literature reviews in inclusive education. The aims include establishing what research has been undertaken in the area of effective pedagogical approaches to enable children with special educational needs to be included in mainstream classrooms, synthesising themes in a purposive sample of the literature and examining how this research might inform practice. One outcome of this first literature review was an overview of the various ways that teachers are effectively including children with special educational needs. In this paper, using the literature, we share some of the characteristics of the teaching approaches that have been shown to lead to positive outcomes in the areas of academic attainment, social involvement and improved behaviour. We discuss how these approaches, particularly those involving peer group interactions, might be used by teachers to support all learners.     

Relationship between private schooling and achievement: Results from rural and urban India

This paper contributes to the important but small body of research on the role of private schools in Indian education. It uses a household dataset from India with a rich set of household covariates and student performance data on reading, writing, and mathematics. For both rural and urban India the results from regression analyses indicate that private school students perform better on tests controlling for covariates. In both contexts, however, the private school benefit becomes largely, statistically, insignificant after conducting multivariate analysis on data balanced using the propensity score matching technique. The paper also makes an initial attempt to identify ‘low-fee’ private schools; within the regression framework it finds that children in such schools may perform no better than their public school counterparts. The data and methods used in this paper are not without limitations; however these analyses call into question the claim that private school effect may be unequivocally positive and highlights the potential heterogeneity in private school performance in the Indian context.