Discipline-based education researchers have a natural laboratory--classrooms, programs, colleges, and universities. Studies that administer treatments to multiple sections, in multiple years, or at multiple institutions are particularly compelling for two reasons: first, the sample sizes increase, and second, the implementation of the treatments…

Potentially all university graduates, regardless of the discipline they have studied, are expected to have obtained generic learning outcomes, which we refer to as "graduateness." This study investigates the extent to which learning programmes' emphasis on graduateness affects students' perceived abilities in the domains of graduateness.…

Data from 787 international undergraduate students at an urban university in the United States were used to demonstrate the importance of separating a sample into meaningful subgroups in order to demonstrate the ability of an English language assessment to predict the first-year grade point average (GPA). For example, when all students were pooled…

Data from the 2010 administration of the Faculty Survey of Student Engagement were used to identify pairs of disciplines in which faculty want to be compared based on research practices, teaching practices, and perceptions of student engagement in academic activities. The goal of this study was to group disciplines by a method with which faculty…

The motivation to teach is a powerful, yet neglected, force in teaching at institutes of higher education. A better understanding of academics' motivations for teaching is necessary. The aim of this mixed-method study was to identify groups with distinctively different motivations for teaching. Six clusters were identified: expertise, duty,…

Teaching approaches in higher education have already been the subject of a considerable body of research. An important contribution was Prosser and Trigwell's development of the Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI). The present study aims to map out the approaches to teaching profiles of teachers in higher education on the basis of their scores…

This study identifies clusters of U.S. and Canadian metropolitan areas with similar knowledge traits. These groups--ranging from Making Regions, characterized by knowledge about manufacturing, to Thinking Regions, noted for knowledge about the arts, humanities, information technology, and commerce--can be used by analysts and policymakers for the…

This paper explores students' conceptions of good teaching in three different disciplines. Moreover, the aim is to explore the relation between these conceptions and students' approaches to learning by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. A total of 695 students from the Faculties of Behavioural Sciences, Law and Veterinary Medicine…

The diversity of IS programs and research has been of interest to various professions. It has been argued that IS has developed to the extent where it does not have to rely on other reference disciplines, but should rather serve as a reference discipline for other disciplines. While IS may have developed its own discipline, its location in…

The division of cognitive labor is fundamental to all cultures. Adults have a strong sense of how knowledge is clustered in the world around them and use that sense to access additional information, defer to relevant experts, and ground their own incomplete understandings. One prominent way of clustering knowledge is by disciplines similar to…

This paper discusses visual communication theory. After an examination of the literature, this study built a more extensive bibliography of visual communication in general--theory, research, teaching--as well as a taxonomy that was better grounded. A 95-page bibliography was developed for works from a number of scholarly journals dealing with…

Examines the structure of the discipline of communication using the frequency of joint memberships in the International Communication Association's divisions and interest groups. Finds that the structure is more complex than previously suggested by bibliometric research. (SR)

Author cocitation analysis was used to investigate changes in intellectual structure of macroeconomics over two consecutive time periods, 1972-1977 and 1978-1983. Profile analysis, nonmetric multidimensional scaling, and clustering techniques were used to create two-dimensional maps displaying changing relationships among 41 authors as perceived…

The educational purpose of the curricular breadth encouraged at liberal arts institutions is for students to acquire a variety of skills and knowledge, but it is often claimed that most skills are taught "across the curriculum," and liberal arts colleges tend to downplay disciplinary information when listing their educational goals. In this…

This study attempts to analyze descriptors taken from subject categories in ERIC thesaurus and used as search terms on CROSS database Bibliographic Retrieval Services. An expectation ratio was computed and cluster analysis was conducted to discover subject relationships among databases. A list of databases retrieved and 12 references are appended.…