This paper reviews the literature on the use of intensive teaching formats in the tertiary sector. The paper begins with a summary of recent changes in higher education which have led to the consideration of intensive teaching as a mode of learning. The paper then addresses two principal issues: the advantages and disadvantages of intensive teaching formats and the main learning issues involved The paper will identify some of the main themes in this literature concentrating on the literature in the tertiary sector. It then draws some tentative conclusions about the advantages and disadvantages of intensive teaching formats.

Through feminist informed understandings of injustice, this paper draws on significant research to re-articulate prevailing issues of gender inequity within and beyond the contexts of education in Australia. Following a location of the unconvincing but pervasive warrant for boys' issues to dominate the gender equity scene, the paper turns to a discussion about locating and leveraging strategic points of intervention for transformative gender just educational policy and practice. New and emerging policy environments, more receptive to educational research, that address issues of economic and cultural marginalisation in new times are argued to offer generative spaces to reinvigorate crucial gender debates associated with post-school pathways and social outcomes. Foregrounding feminist concerns in these areas is presented as central to constructing strong policy frames that can better address issues of gender, economic marginalisation and cultural disadvantage. The paper then turns to a discussion about how radical re-envisionings of curriculum and pedagogy, to reflect issues of distributive and cultural justice, might work to dismantle and transform the inequitable power relations and underlying frameworks that generate gender injustice within and beyond the contexts of education. The paper concludes by illustrating the imperative of drawing on transformative gender justice lenses to evaluate and, in particular, anticipate the limits of particular reform agendas and interventions.

In this study we examined the relationship between children's social skills and bullying behaviours. Teachers rated social skills and indirect and direct physical bullying behaviours of 120 students in elementary school. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that social skills are inversely related to both direct physical bullying (beta = -.61, p < .001) and indirect bullying (beta = -.50, p < .001). According to teachers' perceptions, children who bully their peers, regardless of the form of bullying they use, lack prosocial skills to effectively manage interpersonal relationships.

This paper discusses grounded theory as one of the qualitative research designs. It describes how grounded theory generates from data. Three phases of grounded theory - open coding, axial coding, and selective coding - are discussed, along with some of the issues which are the source of debate among grounded theorists, especially between its founders, Glaser and Strauss.

A curriculum initiative project was implemented in four schools in Singapore over a span of five to six weeks during 2004. The project employed a number of different schools: girls only, boys only and co-educational schools; different levels of performance in a graded situation; multiple teachers and classes within each site; and control and experimental conditions for the curriculum implementation. In conducting research in the diverse schools, there was also an opportunity to study the interactions between action research and multiple site case studies.

Though action research and case studies are frequently used in education to research curriculum initiatives, their interactions are seldom explored. Moreover, the practical benefits and challenges of multiple site case studies in action research are little discussed. In this paper, the interactions between action research and multiple site case studies as well as the practical and theoretical benefits and challenges are explored. By examining the particular benefits and challenges presented by this project, it is hoped that this paper will contribute to a better understanding of multiple site case study action research through describing the practical benefits and challenges, as well as the theoretical advantages and disadvantages, of multiple site action research case studies, and the means used to overcome the challenges that arose during the course of the case studies.

Pedagogical change is posited as a crafting process constituted by the relational activity of social and material actors. A case study was used to investigate how pedagogical change becomes enacted in everyday practices in an independent boys' school in Australia. In comparison to a scripted implementation plan, the pedagogical change process was more accurately characterised by multiple, disparate patterns of activity. The use of a set of guiding principles for cultivating a school environment that enables pedagogical change is proposed.

Supporting students to be self- directed learners in classrooms is currently more important than it has ever been in the past. The rapidly changing nature of society, the demands of the 'new economy' and the contemporary understanding of life long learning have combined to highlight the need for students to be increasingly independent learners. This study investigated eight and nine year old children's capabilities to develop skills in the intrapersonal intelligence domain as defined by Howard Gardner. A group of twenty-seven students identified as low achievers in English were introduced to a program specifically designed to foster their self-knowledge as learners and establish how this self-knowledge may be used to improve their self-management skills in the English learning environment. The results obtained evidenced a considerable improvement in the students' self knowledge and attested to how this impacted on their perceptions of themselves as learners and their behaviours in the learning context. The students grew increasingly aware of their own relative strengths and used this information to negotiate their learning environment, to identify strategies that worked for them and to take increasingly more responsibility for their own learnings.