Three interviews each with five people who had articulated a life mission and analysis of their journals delineated the relationship of life mission to self-directed and transformative learning. New learning experiences refocus mission. The stronger and more focused the mission, the stronger and more focused the learner's self-direction. (SK)

Reports on a qualitative investigation of the effects of integrating concept maps into freshman-level general chemistry curriculum. Indicates that students in the experimental section had significantly more links and nodes in their concept maps than students in the traditional section. There were no significant differences between the two sections…

Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies have advantages and disadvantages. Choice of methodology should be determined by the nature of the research objectives. Cooperative education researchers should consider qualitative or combined-methodology inquiries including interviews and action research. (SK)

Although teenage pregnancy is at the center of much current social concern and political debate, the focus tends to be on the young mothers and their children. The lives and parenting experiences of young fathers typically receive less attention from researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. This article presents findings from a qualitative…

All fields of research need to reconsider, on an ongoing basis, their standards for research quality. At the present time in mathematics education, such discussion is particularly critical to the ongoing growth and strength of the field. Mathematics education research has evolved significantly in the last 20 years. The most sweeping change has…

Interpersonal connections, friendships, and belonging play important roles in a person's emotional and physical well-being. However, recent studies reveal that persons with developmental disabilities often live with few connections and friendships within unwelcoming communities. Through this qualitative study, we enter this relatively unexplored…

This paper presents the results of a two-year qualitative inquiry, carried out in Spain, on a rather neglected side of external support to schools: the personal and professional experience of external support agents when they go back to teaching. These ex-advisers are career teachers who return 'home' to school after having left it to serve for…

Despite availability of empirically supported school-based substance abuse prevention programs, adoption and implementation fidelity of such programs appear to be low. A replicated case study was conducted to investigate school adoption and implementation processes of the EXSELS model (Project ALERT delivered by program leaders through Cooperative…

Losing friendships are significant events for people throughout their life span. In spite of the importance of friendships to psychosocial health, studies of friendships loss are not found in the literature. This article begins to address this gap through a qualitative study utilizing autobiographical poetry as data. This study exemplifies…

The aim of this article is to discuss guidelines for support staff experiencing aggression in schools and to develop an approach for the support staff to deal with aggression to facilitate their mental health. The researchers explored the experience of aggression of the support staff in a chosen school by conducting phenomenological, unstructured…

A general inductive approach for analysis of qualitative evaluation data is described. The purposes for using an inductive approach are to (a) condense raw textual data into a brief, summary format; (b) establish clear links between the evaluation or research objectives and the summary findings derived from the raw data; and (c) develop a…

In this paper, pedagogical issues drawn from a study to examine the nature and quality of correspondence tuition are analysed. The paper observes that effective correspondence tuition depends on a number of factors ranging from the tutors' academic competence to their professional experience, values and assumptions about distance learning. Given…

How might qualitative researchers meaningfully operate in a contemporary research climate that holds to such limited conceptions of what constitutes "scientific" research in education? This article discusses implications of scientifically based research (SBR) and identifies several pathways along which researchers may productively work in such a…

Scholars have studied epistemological development--or how one understands knowledge and knowing--of college students for many years. Research in this domain has included benchmarking studies of epistemological development, examinations of how curricular innovations impact epistemology, and some studies of differences in epistemological development…

This article discusses the primary qualities of a doctoral dissertation proposal and how those qualities relate to the qualities of a dissertation and to the nature of a research university. Typical parts of a proposal are discussed--problem, significance, literature review, theoretical perspective, questions, methods, and ethics--and reasons are…