While much is known about secondary students' perspectives of climate change, rather less is known about undergraduate students' perspectives. The purpose of this study is to investigate general chemistry students' understanding of the chemistry underlying climate change. Findings that emerged from the analysis of the 24 interviews indicate that…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the factors that employees perceived were important in creating a supportive learning environment in a recently merged organisation. The study provides rich qualitative data from the employees' perspective. Design/methodology/approach: This case study used a qualitative phenomenological constructivist…

This longitudinal study aimed to examine the role of a professional learning community (PLC) in changing teachers' beliefs and practices. Teachers of a Chinese department in a Hong Kong secondary school were interviewed and observed. The findings indicate that the features of a PLC-facilitating teacher change are development of a coherent…

The conflicts between nature and nurture are brought to the fore and challenges socio-scientific decision-making in science education. The multitude of meanings of these concepts and their roles in societal discourses can impede students' development of understanding for different perspectives, e.g. on gene technology. This study problematizes…

Increasingly, graduate teaching "assistants" (GTAs) are not "assisting" faculty instructors, but finding themselves in the role of lead instructor, particularly in physical activity courses. Despite this responsibility, GTAs receive little or no pedagogical training and often feel unprepared to teach. Conversely, college and…

In this study, we interviewed victims of bias incidents and members of a bias response team to investigate the process the team used to respond to incidents. Incidents included acts of sexism, homophobia, and racism on a large, predominantly White research university in the Midwest. Data were analyzed using a 4-stage coding process. The emergent…

Questioning and discussion techniques are effective instructional methods that develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. Despite these positive associations, there is often inconsistent implementation of these techniques across disciplines and grade levels, often resulting in a negative effect on student achievement. This case study…

This paper examines the way Higher Education (HE) students use metaphors to make tangible the lived and living experience of learning. The article provides a contemporary development of the ethnographic paradigm by offering a new model termed "proximal ethnography" to capture the sense of inside-out-inside research, of being what one has…

This study aims to examine the factors influencing pre-service Physical Education (PE) teachers' perception of a specific constructivist approach--Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) in Hong Kong. By adopting a qualitative approach, 20 pre-service PE teachers were recruited for individual semi-structured interviews. Deductive data analysis was…

Background: It has been widely accepted that reflective teaching is a powerful component of effective teaching. Accordingly, educating reflective practitioners has been a major goal of teacher education. Reflective teaching refers to the act of thinking such as analyzing or assessing educational meanings, intentions, beliefs, decisions, actions,…

I present here the results of a qualitative research study on the impact of a curriculum that connects learning events in Spanish and English in authentic communicative performances during its first year of use in a private school in a medium-size Colombian city. I did discourse analysis of interviews with participating teachers and class…

This dissertation investigated the conceptual schemes children constructed as they related division number sentences to various types of fractions: Proper fractions, improper fractions, and mixed numbers in both contextual and abstract symbolic forms. It was hypothesized that student's understanding depends heavily on the role played by factors…

This qualitative ethnographic study examines five American teenagers' historical and current digitally-mediated multiliteracy practices within digital popular culture. The participants included three male and two female students of a private high school in the Midwestern United States. The study is framed by the notion that literacy is a socially,…

In relation to health promotion and education, the use of post-positivist and constructivist approaches has been gathering strength in recent years. Despite this emerging tradition, little has been done to explore what this sort of approach actually represents, particularly in terms of health promotion in schools, professional organizations and…

This article reports on a classroom-based case study of a group of six Year 10 students, within a class of 23 students. The study implemented constructivist-informed teaching and learning approaches within a classroom setting in the topic of optics and documented any changes in the conceptual understanding students had about seven central concepts…