A year-long ethnographic case study examined two public city high school English teachers' efforts to reform their literature instruction and evaluation practices through the use of portfolios. One case study teacher ("William") has 30 years of teaching experience and was heavily influenced by New Criticism. The other teacher…

A case study described the English literacy learning of two language minority students in a suburban kindergarten program in a predominantly white school district. Data collected throughout the school year indicated that weak home and school communication related to inaccurate interpretations of the children's literacy learning which led to…

Designed as the first phase of a larger project to explore the relationships between the possible impact of reminiscence on memory deterioration in elderly women confined to nursing home environments, a study demonstrated that reminiscence activity is positively correlated with increases in communication interactions. Women were chosen as the…

A quasi meta-analysis approach was used to examine the research methodologies used to study issues related to youth (ages 13-25) and careers. Psychlit, ERIC, Dissertation Abstracts, and four journals were searched to identify articles for the study. A total of 67 articles from 18 different sources were analyzed. Eighty-seven percent were from…

This study investigated the usefulness of reflective journals and ethnographic data collection methods in studying the learning experience of business English students. Subjects were two students, one Japanese and one German, observed in both business English and general English classes. The researchers were two collaborating teachers. Problems…

The report describes an ethnographic study of a New York City (New York) middle school that focused on the school as a setting for cultural interchange. The relatively small school has an ethnically and culturally diverse student body that strives to build a strong feeling of community. The study looked at ways in which the school attends to…

This paper examines efforts to reverse language shift in two indigenous communities in southern Ecuador. The ongoing decline and rapid pace of extinction of many of the world's languages have received increasing amounts of attention, but while processes of language loss and extinction have been extensively studied, relatively little work of…

A meeting of professional experts in pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) focused on gathering current expert opinion regarding assistance to families with a child having such an injury. Quantitative data from an ethnographic survey of 214 parents on the effects of TBI on the family is summarized. Then, normalization for families of TBI children…

This paper argues that in addition to being an important source of data for a project evaluator, project humor also provides a check on the evaluator's comprehension of background and events (i.e., if an evaluator does not understand a joke, he or she has probably not attained an insider's perspective). In addition, humor becomes a source of…

This collection contains three papers on the Cotabato Manobo language and culture and one on a variety of cultures. "Cotabato Manobo Grammar" by Harland Kerr is an extensive description of the grammar focusing on syntactic relationships within it. "Cotabato Manobo Ethnography" by Harland Kerr is a 1957 ethnographic study based…

Research findings are reported that suggest that valid interpretation of assessment scores on illiterate and preliterate learners requires the use of ethnographic data. Data from observation notes, photos, and audiotapes indicated that learners' understanding of their tasks affected their performance in assessment situations. Previous findings…

An action research study examined a teacher's developing collaborative practices in her secondary curriculum development and instructional methods class. The class was composed of 14 women ranging in age from 21 to approximately 50 in a medium sized southwestern university. Data were collected through a reflective journal and from certain student…

The strategic learning of college and university students begins with their acquisition of knowledge about their academic context and its learning opportunities and demands. However, traditional assessment measures isolate the student outside of the authentic learning context, which limits the information available from these tests. In contrast,…

In the 1980s, the Border Early Learning Center (BELC) was established to provide support and training for preschools and communities in South Africa. This report describes the rationale and process of an evaluation of preschools associated with the BELC. (The data and conclusions of the evaluation are not included in this report.) A questionnaire…

Though rooted in neo-Piagetian research, constructivism is an avenue of research that departed from the neo-Piagetian mainstream 20 years ago and has continued on a distinct path of development. For constructivists, learning is not knowledge written on, or transplanted to, a person's mind as if the mind were a blank slate waiting to be written on…