Abstract. Changing lecturers' teaching strategies to improve learning in higher education may mean first having to address the intentions associated with those strategies. The study reported in this paper used a phenomenographic approach to explore the intentions associated with the teaching strategies of first year physical science lecturers. Approaches found ranged from those involving information transmission to those where the intention was to develop learning through conceptual change, but in all approaches, logical relations were found between intention and strategy. The implications for attempts to improve teaching through developing strategies are discussed.

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Summary. Over 800 children from primary and secondary schools ranked items descriptive of a ‘good’ teacher in four scales. The items of each scale were representative of statements made by children in short essays about ‘A Good Teacher.’ The four scales were so organised as to sample three hypothesized areas of the good teacher's class‐room behaviour: discipline, teaching and personal qualities; and to bring together in the fourth scale these three areas for comparative evaluation. A sample of teachers and training college students also completed the comparative scale. Together with the scales a check‐list of twenty pairs of items was administered to the children. Children from junior schools also completed a scale concerned with the ‘good’ teacher's class‐room organisation. Differences were found between children at different stages of education, between children and teachers, between teachers and students, and within teachers, between graduate and non‐graduate teachers. The reasons for these differences are discussed.

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Summary. An inquiry was carried out among 470 teachers in grammar, modern, junior and infant schools to establish how widely or narrowly they conceived their role and what elements they gave greatest weight to within it. Grammar school teachers had a more constricted view of their role than their modern school colleagues, and junior school teachers working in middle‐class areas than their colleagues in working class districts. Married women junior school teachers had a more restricted view of their role than single teachers. In all types of school teachers saw their work primarily in intellectual and moral terms and were comparatively indifferent to more general social training, although modern school teachers gave more emphasis to social training than grammar school teachers. All saw parents as comparatively indifferent to moral objectives in the education of their children, primarily concerned with ‘instruction’ but also attaching great importance to ‘social advancement.’ A sample of 237 parents, in fact, gave a list of educational priorities which agreed in substance with the ratings made by teachers.

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Summary. A moderately speeded, moderately difficult multiple‐choice mathematics test was set under three different instructions to three random samples of 15‐year‐old pupils of average and above average ability. The aim of the instructions was to dispose the pupil so as to inhibit his propensity to guess (A), to encourage it (C), and to be neutral in respect to guessing (B). Analysis of variance of both raw and corrected scores showed there to be no significant effect attributable to instructions either in the whole test or in the earlier or later part of the test. The instructions affected the pupils' item response pattern. There were fewer omits and unfinished' items than would be expected by chance arising from the inhibiting instructions (A), more from the instruction encouraging guessing (C) and the level expected by chance from the neutral instructions (B). The concurrent validity was not significantly affected by the instructions.