Purpose: This article explores challenges faced by doctoral candidates using grounded theory (GT) in their theses, focusing on coding, theory development and time constraints. It also examines the impact of doctoral committees on GT dissertations, addressing epistemological clashes and the desire for familiarity over novelty.…

Measurement in the social sciences involves assigning values to particular empirical cases and plays a vital role in the research process, but it can be tricky to teach. Unless an undergraduate social sciences research methods course includes the collection of original data, many of the issues of measurement can seem abstract and arcane to…

Economics has become increasingly empirical and, alongside this shift, has come more demand for improved transparency and reproducibility in empirical economic research. In this article, we distribute a survey to almost 1500 economics faculty from the top 161 liberal arts colleges with an economics major (according to U.S. News & World Report)…

Introduction: This paper merges two neglected components within the psychological sciences broadly and research methods courses specifically: Critical whiteness and qualitative methodologies. Statement of the Problem: In psychology programs, regardless of discipline, research courses remain one area where issues of race and racism, such as…

Given that so many college students take Introduction to Sociology or Social Problems or both, we wondered about the amount of content overlap in these courses. We designed a study that used content analysis of syllabi from these courses in order to measure the amount of convergence between the two classes. In our sample, nearly 70 percent of the…

After presenting a brief overview of the key elements that underpin Etienne Wenger's communities of practice (CoP) theoretical framework, one of the most widely cited and influential conceptions of social learning, this paper reviews extant empirical work grounded in this framework to investigate online/blended learning in higher education and in…

The main purpose of this study was to determine the effect of homework assignments on students' academic achievement. This meta-analysis sought an answer to the research question: "What kind of effect does homework assignment have on students' academic achievement levels?" In this research, meta-analysis was adopted to determine the…

Research with preschool children has shown that explanations are important to them in that they actively seek explanations in their conversations with adults. But what sorts of explanations do they prefer, and what, if anything, do young children learn from the explanations they receive? Following a preliminary study with adults (N = 67) to…

Partnerships with students are considered one of the principles of good Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) practice. However, not all partnerships are equally successful. What characteristics are common to successful partnerships and what preparatory elements can lead toward more successful partnerships? In this article, our team of…

The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) asked the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) to undertake research to explore the current issues around academic teaching qualifications in the HESA Staff record and to offer recommendations to improve data quality and coverage in future…

The doctoral journey is as much about identity transitions as it is about becoming an expert in a field of study. However, transitioning from past and professional lives and identities to scholarly identities is not an easy process. Three doctoral students at various stages of completion engaged in self-study research to explore their emerging…

The use of mobile learning in education is growing at an exponential rate. To best understand how mobile learning is being used, it is crucial to gain a collective understanding of the research that has taken place. This research was a systematic review of 36 studies in mobile learning in mathematics from the year 2000 onward. Eight new findings…

Most teacher educators who work at institutes for higher vocational education have faced a new role since the European Community aimed to upgrade the general quality of education. Research tasks have been added as a new important core business for institutes that used to be mainly focused on education. Teacher educators therefore have to become…

This paper employs meta-analysis to determine the influence of computer-based scaffolding characteristics and study and test score quality on cognitive outcomes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics education at the secondary, college, graduate, and adult levels. Results indicate that (a) computer-based scaffolding positively…

This paper presents a content analytic approach on doctoral dissertations in the field of distance education in Turkish Higher Education context from the years of 1986 through 2014. A total of 61 dissertations were examined to explore keywords, academic discipline, research areas, theoretical/conceptual frameworks, research designs, research…