By investigating undergraduates' epistemological orientations and processes in academic and personal contexts, this study examined whether and how epistemological development in one context is related to development in another context. The focus of this particular study was on tension regarding the contextuality of epistemological development. The…

Instructors rely on asynchronous exchanges to provide learners with authentic input and opportunities to communicate in the TL. While most practitioners recognize the advantages of e-mail exchanges, learner benefits are not an automatic byproduct of participation in an exchange. This paper presents findings from an e-mail exchange carried out…

Public universities cite their economic impact to help justify state financial support, but the literature offers no comprehensive theory that can guide analysis of such claims. This research used qualitative methodology to complement the ubiquitous economic impact studies, and showed that mission, leadership and geography determine how public…

Human resource development (HRD) practitioners are adding storytelling to their box of tactical and strategic tools. This qualitative research study investigates how HRD practitioners in for-profit settings apply storytelling as a means of advancing organizational goals. The primary focus of practitioners is on instrumental application of stories…

How teachers and students work together through discourse to construct their understanding of the context they live and work in will influence, in many different ways, the interaction within their classrooms. This article will describe a qualitative discourse analysis--involving three different groups of teachers--which focused on the way in which…

The value of qualitative assessment approaches has been underestimated primarily because they are often juxtaposed against long-standing quantitative traditions and the widely accepted premise that the best research produces generalizable and statistically significant findings. Institutional researchers avoid qualitative methods for at least three…

This study examines 11 interdisciplinary teams involving 30 teachers and 542 students in New York and California. The teams represented an array of approaches to interdisciplinary curricula, ranging from simple correlation to major reconstrual of the contributing disciplines. Teams that engaged in the most reconstrual of traditional content also…

This article reports the findings from a secondary analysis of the data from two qualitative studies conducted by the researcher regarding the self-directed learning experiences of prostate and breast cancer patients. Of interest were possible differences in the descriptions of the participants' experiences that appear to relate to gender.…

This paper describes a case study of 2 departments in a school, where teachers were inquired about their school's needs for improvement and how the institution and their department impacted upon their own professional development. The results show that the teachers' experiences of professional development, their interpersonal relationships within…

This article presents empirical research exploring adult students' transition to higher education (HE) through a program designed to enable that transition. Wenger's Communities of Practice theory has been applied to informal adult learning by Merriam, Courtenay, and Baumgartner (2003), who suggested its potential for understanding formal…

In Eleanor Duckworth's class "T-440: Teaching and Learning" at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, students sometimes wonder how Duckworth's model of teaching and learning works in elementary classroom settings. In this article the author, a graduate of "T-440" and a 6th grade teacher at the Smith College Laboratory School, chronicles her…

Research lauds the benefits of parent involvement in the schools, yet many schools and communities have not achieved desired levels of involvement. Underlying expectations and methods soliciting parent involvement may be rooted in cultural misperceptions. This study, based on Epstein's (1987) Overlapping Spheres of Influence model, explored the…

This paper reports on an ESRC-funded project that investigated the use of corpus-based activities in a primary-school context, with children aged 8-10 years. The study explored the contributions that could be made by a corpus--comprising language written for a child audience--and a modified version of the associated software, in helping these…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to survey the opinions of principals concerning the role of speech-language pathologists (SLPs) serving students with communication disorders who have been involved in violence. Method: A mixed methods design involving 678 questionnaires was mailed to elementary, middle, and high school principals in a…

Despite the best of intentions, qualitative researchers can be faced, in some circumstances, with having to make meaning from thin, or less than optimal, data. Using a real study as context, the authors describe the ways that they made sense of their thin data on teachers' perceptions of a large-scale evaluation instrument. They propose a…