This study describes the problem solving behaviour of bilingual (German - Turkish) primary school students, their approaches and preferences while solving the word problems. Four different types of mathematical word problems (combinations, movement, subtraction and addiction) were given successively to four pupils (one girl and three boys) and…

Learning progressions (LPs) are theoretical models of how learners develop expertise in a domain over extended periods of time. Recent policy reports have touted LPs as a promising approach to aligning standards, curriculum, and assessment. However, the scholarship on LPs is relatively sparse, and the jury is still out on the theoretical and…

What are the key ethical issues involved in conducting archival research? Based on examination of cases and interviews with leading archival researchers in composition, this article discusses several ethical questions and offers a heuristic to guide ethical decision making. Key to this process is recognizing the person-ness of archival materials.…

Heuristic methodology attempts to discover the nature and meaning of phenomenon through internal self-search, exploration, and discovery. Heuristic methodology encourages the researcher to explore and pursue the creative journey that begins inside one's being and ultimately uncovers its direction and meaning through internal discovery (Douglass &…

This article argues the importance of including significant technologies-in-use as key qualitative research participants when studying today's digitally enhanced learning environments. We gather a set of eight heuristics to assist qualitative researchers in "interviewing" technologies-in-use (or other relevant objects), drawing on concrete…

In this essay, we address emerging tensions that are increasingly facing persons, such as ourselves, who choose to reside in borderlands both inside and outside pedagogical settings. Such tensions include matters of location and dislocation, rootedness and uprootedness, diversity and commonality, space and place, time and distance, and so on. The…

The "Approaches to Studying Inventory" (ASI) was based on qualitative research by Marton and Saljo, which established "surface" and "deep" approaches to study. This article attempts a new qualitative explication of the meanings of study. A heuristic due to Husserl is employed which distinguishes between the "noema", the "subjective object" of…

This highly readable text demystifies the qualitative research process--and helps readers conceptualize their own studies--by organizing the different research paradigms and traditions into coherent clusters. Real-world examples and firsthand perspectives illustrate the research process; instructive exercises and activities build on each other so…

A basic premise of social approaches to studying communication is that theories of interpersonal communication and personal relationships are reflexively defined, socially constructed, and historically situated. In contrast to the tradition of psychological models of relational processes and message transmission, social approaches encourage…

This paper is based on hermeneutic research into creativity and learning mentors, focusing on mental well being and the role of the mentor throughout the creative cycle. Participants relate their experiences of the role of the mentor within the creative cycle in their own words. The researcher/participant hermeneutic dialogue shows that the…

In an attempt to find out more about how creative people engage in thinking, more than 50 men and women considered to be prominant in the humanities, the arts, and the sciences were interviewed. Letters, diaries and autobiographies of other creative individuals were examined in an effort to provide a broad base for studying the psychology of…

Presents a case study analysis which attempts to illuminate the difference between knowledge accumulation and ability to deal with problem solving in stoichiometry. Competence is presented as ability to properly represent, solve, and verify solutions. Discusses rule or algorithm based vs. heuristic based problem solving. (JM)

This article describes five political scientists' interview-based accounts of appropriate and inappropriate use of the pronouns "I" and "we" in academic writing. The informants talked about pronoun use with reference to one of their own journal articles and also by referring to other informants' texts. Beliefs about appropriate…

For this article, the development of 1 teacher's pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986) was tracked longitudinally across 2 years as she taught a new instructional unit in middle school mathematics. Growth in pedagogical content knowledge is characterized as the interanimation of 2 Discourses (Gee, 1999). One Discourse refers to…