Search results for ""Author Mei Kuin Lai""
Emerald Publishing Limited A National Developmental and Negotiated Approach to School and Curriculum Evaluation
Current conventions in school evaluation focus on accountability, control and compliance. New Zealand offers a distinctive, systemic alternative to school self-evaluation, with developmental and negotiated approaches ingrained throughout the education system, from school inspection to major government schooling improvement initiatives. In New Zealand there is no national testing, other than a Ministry-sponsored (voluntary) formative assessment system designed for school and teacher self-evaluation. This is a form of professional and program evaluation where there is shared power and responsibility between evaluators and those being evaluated. Through a detailed national case study of New Zealand, together with commentaries from international specialists, this volume examines the successes and challenges of this approach to programme evaluation and its generalizability to other educational and professional review settings, and show how education systems can recover a balance between an achievement agenda and a focus on educational quality.
£120.52
Emerald Publishing Limited Professional Learning Networks in Design-Based Research Interventions
Professional learning networks (PLNs) have been promoted as one way of improving practice in research methodologies and frameworks aimed at the improvement of practice. However, such networks are not yet the norm and there is a growing need for books that provide a theoretical and practical account of how to develop and utilise networks effectively. Mei Kuin Lai and Stuart McNaughton address this need by providing a theoretical and practical account of how PLNs focused on collaborative analysis of data can be integrated into design-based research interventions to improve practice and student learning outcomes. Drawing primarily on examples from a design-based research intervention, the Learning Schools Model, topics covered include theoretical approaches to understanding networks, network purposes and features, constraints and enablers and future directions in utilising networks within design-based research. This intervention is one of the few demonstrations of a consistent and replicable effect of analysing and discussing data in networks on student outcomes within a wider design-based intervention design. The authors discuss the constraints and enablers of the context that influence how PLNs might be implemented across different contexts. Examples of how PLNs can demonstrate fidelity to the general structure of effective networks while adapting to local variations are also provided, enabling readers to conceptualise and design similar networks appropriate to their context.
£44.00
Emerald Publishing Limited Research-practice Partnerships for School Improvement: The Learning Schools Model
There is an increasing focus on research-practice partnerships that adopt research designs aimed at improving educational practice while advancing research knowledge. There is now a need for books that provide a theoretical and practical account of successful research designs that have been tested and replicated over time and contexts. This book addresses this need by providing the first comprehensive account of the Learning Schools Model (LSM), a design-based research-practice partnership that has been tested over 15 years and across contexts and countries (n=5). This model has successfully built teacher and school capacity and improved valued student outcomes for primarily indigenous and ethnic minority students from lower socio-economic communities. The quality of research into the model has been recognised locally and internationally. The International Literacy Association reprinted a paper on the original model in their volume “Theoretical models and processes of Reading (6th Ed)”. The authors won the University of Auckland’s Research Excellence Award (2015), awarded for research of demonstrable quality and impact, for their research into the Model. This book addresses several gaps in the existing literature on research-practice partnerships. Firstly, understanding applications in contexts beyond the USA where much of the seminal work is located adds to our collective understanding of contexts in terms of constraints and enablers. Secondly, we provide a theoretical account of partnership development and demonstrate how these are practically developed in situ to address the known need for stronger theoretical understandings of partnership development and better training in developing partnerships. Finally, our book demonstrates how research can be both responsive to context and yet have robust and replicable research designs that improve valued student outcomes over time and contexts. This in turn provides an alternate research approach for countries where randomised control trials are often the “gold standard” for interventions.
£73.98
