This study explored barriers and facilitating factors affecting the development and use of learning objects in developing instructional materials and their use in supporting individualized learning. Over a two-month period, students in a graduate-level instructional design course developed instructional materials incorporating learning objects or…

The nature of public schooling, particularly at the early and middle childhood levels, makes designing critical qualitative studies around gay and lesbian issues in the school context problematic at best. This article provides a retrospective dialogue between an associate professor and her then Ph.D. candidate advisee that reflects on the tension…

The author used qualitative research methods to explore an 8th-grade mathematics teacher's personal definition of cooperative learning and the enactment of cooperative learning in his classroom according to that definition. Data collection involved interviews and classroom observations. The author used coding schemes and descriptive statistics for…

In this article the author argues that the current state of educational inquiry, particularly as it relates to action research and qualitative inquiry, is in high flux. If this were true, several possible implications follow. First is the idea that with this flux all inquiry occurs in a context that is political, organisational, and geographical.…

In this article, the author shares with the reader some of the insights he has gained through his experience of using photographs as a research tool during a year-long investigation of cultural events at three universities and schools in the Midwest of the United States. The article is divided into two alternating sections: the ones in plain text…

The author analyzes the nature of study programme assessment with regard to the assurance of study quality. The organisation of the assessment process of the non-university study programmes which were developed and submitted for realisation in Lithuania and other countries is also presented and compared. It is being analysed whether it is possible…

This paper explains the principles and procedures of second-order theoretical analysis of observation data. The second-order theoretical procedure is illustrated by analysis of the student-teachers seminar on the subject of the Holocaust, focusing on dilemmas of Holocaust survivors. Analysing observational data allows two distinctive method of…

This article suggests utilizing dialectical imagery, as understood by German social philosopher Walter Benjamin, as an additional qualitative data analysis strategy for research into the postmodern condition. The use of images mined from research data may offer epistemological transformative possibilities that will assist in the demystification of…

A consensual qualitative research methodology was used to analyze the career counseling cases of 12 noted vocational psychologists to identify common themes and factors. The findings indicated that the career counseling described by these experts often involved the same counseling or helping skills found in personal counseling or psychotherapy.…

Qualitative career assessments are theoretically based interventions that are grounded in constructivism. Constructivism is a departure from the traditional logical positive worldview that has influenced the development of many traditional career assessments. A central concept to constructivism is the importance of meaning, which can only be…

Assessing influential factors in the family relative to career decision making is consistent with evolving postmodern approaches to career counseling. However, the challenge of measuring family influence is technically demanding considering the ongoing revolutionary changes in the structure of the family. Moreover, while measuring the impact of…

Interrater reliability has thus far not been a common application in phenomenological studies. However, once the suggestion was brought up by a team of supervising professors during the preliminary orals of a phenomenological study, the utilization of this verification tool turned out to be vital to the credibility level of this type of inquiry,…

Researchers may not feel equipped to conduct qualitative research with ethnic minority communities in England because they may lack of culturally sensitive research skills. The aim of this paper is to explore how researchers might integrate culturally sensitive research skills into their work. This paper draws on our own experiences of conducting…

This paper describes the process for employing two principal instruments for relating the categories identifying the central phenomenon in grounded theory analysis. The Conditional Relationship Guide contextualizes the central phenomenon and relates structure with process. The second tool, the Reflective Coding Matrix, captures the higher level of…

This article theorizes the issue of validity from a social constructionist perspective, particularly as it is applied to the assessment of qualitative research. Validity must be interrogated for its discursive function within the social sciences. I will argue that, as a criterion of assessment, validity polices the social science enterprise and…