Background: Problem solving is considered to be a central activity of engineering practice. While some studies have shown how various beliefs affect students' abilities to solve problems, studies are needed that explicitly examine the beliefs and assumptions students bring to the problem-solving process. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this…

Texts and articles that put epistemological theories and methodologies to work in the context of qualitative research can stimulate scholarship in various ways such as through methodological innovations, transferability of theories and methods, interdisciplinarity, and transformative reflections across traditions and frameworks. Such…

Open-ended problem solving is a central skill in engineering practice; consequently, it is imperative for engineering students to develop expertise in solving these types of problems. The complexity of open-ended problems requires a unique set of skills. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the approaches used by engineering…

Although educational researchers predominately study complex, multidimensional problems, research findings and proposed arguments can sometimes be characterized as definite, simplified, and prone to particular types of answers or expected outcomes. The authors seek to problematize these definite and simplified notions of answers by looking at some…

In this article, the author problematizes external, objectified, oversimplified, and mechanical approaches to validity in qualitative research, which endorse simplistic and reductionist views of knowledge and data. Instead of promoting one generalizable definition or operational criteria for validity, the author's "deconstructive validity work"…

In this conceptual paper, we discuss how carefully developed research questions may support qualitative researchers by providing boundaries for their study designs. These boundaries could indicate a researcher's epistemological and theoretical connections and support his or her research choices. Although these boundaries are permeable and in flux,…

The purpose of this paper is to explore some challenges and promises when the epistemological diversity embedded in qualitative research traditions is introduced to research communities with one dominant research paradigm, such as engineering education. Literature is used from other fields and empirical data are used from engineering education,…

This article explores epistemological awareness and instantiation of methods, as well as uninformed ambiguity, in qualitative methodological decision making and research reporting. The authors argue that efforts should be made to make the research process, epistemologies, values, methodological decision points, and argumentative logic open,…

The purpose of this article is to illustrate how theory and particularly the theoretical perspective of social constructionism can influence the ways in which scholars conduct qualitative research studies in the area of family systems. The authors argue for the importance of theory in qualitative research projects and promote researchers' clear…

Since its original inception in the 1960s grounded theory has been widely used by many qualitative researchers. However, recently epistemologically different versions of grounded theory have been presented and this epistemological diversity among grounded theorists and the erosion of the method will be the major focus of this paper. The first…

Robert Sternberg's model of giftedness brings together interesting and very important elements of giftedness by synthesizing wisdom, intelligence, and creativity in novel ways. While his model is based on extensive research and utilizes a variety of sources and expertise, the epistemological consistency of Sternberg's model is, in the author's…