Best Paper Award Winners 2006 - present

Best Paper Award 2025
Samira Hasanzade's paper "Silent Path to Peace Exploring Peace Education through an Intercultural Art-Based Workshop" examines how peace can be understood, communicated, and co-created through silence and artistic expression. Drawing on arts-based research and semiotic analysis, the study explores how participants from diverse cultural backgrounds expressed their understandings of peace through visual art and collective reflection.
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Best Paper Award 2024
Thi Bogossian's paper "Building Inclusive School Climates: Strategies for Supporting Migrant Children's Sense of Belonging" speaks to ongoing conversations about how schools can better support migrant and ethnic minority students. It offers practical ideas for educators and policymakers seeking to create more inclusive and nurturing environments for all children, no matter where they come from.
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Best Paper Award 2023
Alexandra Dannenberg's paper "Categorizing Math Problems as ‘Easy’ and ‘Difficult’ – An Elementary School Mathematics Teacher’s Interaction with a Newly Arrived Student Analyzed in Two Steps" is part of the broader research interest to investigate what relevance language unfolds in mathematics classroom interaction and whether linguistically diverse students receive different opportunities for learning mathematics.
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Best Paper Award 2022
Aigul Rakisheva's paper "Bridging the urban-rural gaps in education in Kazakhstan. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and students’ performance" explores the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on the academic performance of Kazakhstani students in PISA (2018) Reading, Math, and Science literacy and the moderating effect of the school location.
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13.05.2022
Best Paper Award 2021
Riikka Suhonen's paper “Economic growth or planetary well-being? Representations of global citizenship in UNESCO, European Union and Finnish vocational education policies” explores how vocational students are constructed as global citizens in policy documents (2015-2021).
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05.02.2021
Best Paper Award 2020
Pontus Bäckström’s paper “The Mechanisms of Peer-Effects in Education: A Frame-factor Analysis of Instruction” investigates how peer effects in education arises. Even though there has been an extensive research into peer effects in education, less research has focused on the modus operandi behind them.
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20.05.2020
Best Paper Award 2019
Sofia Eleftheriadou’s paper “Conceptualisation and measurement of collaborative problem solving: a systematic review of the literature” presents results of a systematic review of the literature on collaborative problem solving (CPS) in education published in research journals over the past two decades.
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Best Paper Award 2018
Sara Franch’s paper “Global Citizenship Education: a new ‘moral pedagogy’ for the 21st century?” focuses on the emergence of Global Citizenship Education (GCE) in the educational discourse of a province in northern Italy and outlines how policy-makers and teachers construct GCE as a pedagogical framework for schooling in the 21st century.
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Best Paper Award 2017
Abdoulaye Faye's paper “How Do Teachers React to Organizational Change in Education” has taken advantage of the context of the 2016 Secondary School reform in France to consider the agents' experiences when they have to deal with major organizational changes.
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Best Paper Award 2016
Manuela Mendoza´s paper "To mix or not to mix: Exploring the dispositions to otherness in schools" reflects on the ways social diversity in a school may shape particular subjective dispositions to otherness on students and parents.
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Best Paper Award 2015
Panagiota Gkofa’s paper ‘Greek Roma’s Educational Pathways: Mapping Factors Leading to Success’ is based on a qualitative study which examines how twenty Greek Roma who have entered higher education account for their educational success.
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Best Paper Award 2014
Iryna Kushnir’s paper ‘The Role of the Bologna Process in Defining Europe’ is based on critical review of literature about Europe and its recent higher education reforms, as well as on the analysis of the international Bologna Process documents since 1998.
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Best Paper Award 2013
Cora Lingling Xu’s paper ‘Identity and Cross-border Student Mobility: The Mainland China-Hong Kong Experience and Its Inverse-directional Parallel European Implications’ is based on a multiple case study of the identity constructions of tertiary-level border-crossing students from mainland China studying in Hong Kong universities.
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Best Paper Award 2012
Triin’s paper “School choice policy – seeking to balance educational efficiency and equity: A comparative analysis of 20 European countries” is based on fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to investigate the impact of several institutional conditions of European school systems on educational success.
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Best Paper Award 2011
Anneli Schwartz´s paper is based on an ethnographic investigation of schooling in a multi-ethnic, multi-racial area of multi-dimensional poverty. It analyses the use of an individuating pedagogy that is designed and intended to improve the performances and behaviour of pupils in a school and the subjective responses of the pupils to this pedagogy.
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Best Paper Award 2010
Fighting off stiff competition, Daniel Fischer has been chosen as the winner of the ECER 2010 Best Paper Award for his paper 'Educational Organisations as "Cultures of Consumption"'. Radhika Gorur and Andrea Bernhard were selected as runners-up in the competition.
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Best Paper Award 2009
The 2009 Best Paper Award was given to Konstanze Spohrer from University of Strathclyde, Educational and Professional Studies, Glasgow for the paper titled: Deconstructing “Aspiration”: UK policy debates and European policy trends"
The 2009 Paper Award received about 30 submissions. 50% of participants followed the invitation to re-submit their initial papers based on the feedback they received from the reviewers.
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Best Paper Award 2008
The 2008 Best Paper Competition saw a new record in participation. More than 30 promising papers were handed in. Katrin Kaufmann and Halit Öztürk were awarded with the Best Paper Award 2008. Their paper focussed on “Migration background and participation in continuing education in Germany”
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Best Paper Award 2007
Nasser Mansour, a research fellow who recently completed his PhD from the School of Education and Lifelong Learning at the University of Exeter has been awarded the European Educational Research Association (EERA) Best Paper Award for Postgraduate and Young Researchers.
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Best Paper Award 2006
Amanda Cook-Jones paper on "The Changing Role of the Teaching Assistant in the Primary School Sector" has been selected as the best paper in the Best Paper Award 2006.
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Best Paper Award 2026

Submission deadline 20 Nov 2026
Formative feedback given 20 Feb 2027
Resubmission deadline 20 March 2027
Winner announced early May 2027
Questions on how to submit? dow@eera.eu

First-hand Insights

Learn what Sofia Eleftheriadou, winner of the Best Paper Award 2019, found useful about the Emerging Researcher's Conference and the Best Paper Award on the EERA Blog.

Sponsor Best Paper Award

The Best Paper Award is sponsord by Maxqda / Verbi Software.
Winners' Testimonials
Previous Best Paper winners were asked to provide a testimonial to inspire current emerging researchers.
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Winners' Published Papers
Celebrating and rewarding the outstanding contributions of emerging researchers' rich and diverse publications.
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