When conceived of as both a research strategy and mode to present findings, vignettes can be combined with various qualitative methodologies in higher education research. Rather than being a discipline unto itself, higher education research is best understood as a multi and cross-disciplinary field of study that, we contend, is made richer by its…

A growing interest in the concept of practice within workplace settings has been seen in the last two decades in a variety of fields. Although some authors highlighted the importance of this type of research, there is still a poor scientific understanding of this process. The first serious discussion and analysis of the construction of knowledge…

We propose a graph mining methodology to analyze the relationships among academic programs from the point of view of cooperative education. The input consists of student - job interview pairs, with each student labelled with his or her academic program. From this input, we build a weighted directed graph, which we refer to as a program graph, in…

This chapter reviews actionable data use--both as an umbrella term and as a specific concept--developed in three different traditions that data/information can inform and guide P-20 educational practice toward better outcomes. The literatures reviewed are known as data-driven decision making (DDDM), education data mining (EDM), and learning…

The central goal of the field of second language acquisition (SLA) is to describe and explain how second language learners acquire the target language. In order to achieve this goal, SLA researchers work with second language data, which can take a variety of forms, including (but not limited to) such commonly used methods as naturalistic…

Scientific results are communicated visually in the literature through diagrams, visualizations, and photographs. In this thesis, we developed a figure processing pipeline to classify more than 8 million figures from PubMed Central into different figure types and study the resulting patterns of visual information as they relate to scholarly…

Individuals and teams engaging in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in multidisciplinary higher education settings must make decisions regarding choice of research methodology and methods. These decisions are guided by the research context and the goals of the inquiry. With reference to our own recent experiences investigating…

The practice of documentation is discussed as a means of making learning visible in the LC classroom. A documentation heuristic consisting of a four-stage cycle was used to capture, analyze and report what Bass and Eynon (2009) refer to as the "visible evidence of invisible learning" (p. 5). A variety of documentation samples are…

Australia holds some of the most unique, diverse and vulnerable ecosystems in the world, ranging from marine, coral reefs, to the arid and semi-arid outback, to tropical rainforests. Young children's perceptions of, and attitudes to their environment carry with them into adulthood, determining their capacity to learn about and interact with their…

The scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) is a distinctive form of research that is shaped by multidisciplinary contexts and focuses on practice-driven institutional/curricula/classroom inquiries with an explicit transformational agenda. This essay provides critical insight to the importance of communities of SoTL practitioners, diverse…

Over the past thirty years, there has been much dialogue, and debate, about the conduct of educational technology research and development. In this brief volume, the author helps clarify that dialogue by theoretically and empirically charting the research methods used in the field and provides much practical information on how to conduct…

Despite the wealth of studies on smaller learning communities (SLCs), student voices are missing from the debate on high school reform. This article examines how students experience SLCs. A participatory research method, data-in-a-day was used to provide a systematic and inclusive method for gathering data on student perceptions. Data-in-a-day is…

Schools are complex institutions in which change occurs almost constantly. As each new piece of information is learned, the learner is changed, never to return to the same state they were prior to the act of learning, (Morrison, 2002). This study investigates the impact of interdisciplinary lesson study on teachers' instructional decisions and…

Speech communication workers have been reluctant to use physiological variables in their work. The arguments against their use have ranged from a fear of invading the realm of the psychologist or physiologist, thereby damaging the uniqueness and disciplinary identity of speech communication, to a feeling by certain scholars that the appropriate…

This article adopts "citation approach" to distinguish interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary research (IDR) from monodisciplinary research and begins to descrie how IDR differs from other research. Ten-year citation histories were constructed for sample of 1981 "citation classics" (over-cited articles) and examined for…