Taking the establishment of structured doctoral programmes in Germany as an example, this paper focuses on how knowledge production in certain academic fields reshapes their doctoral education in a widely changing policy context. Based on case studies of eight graduate schools in three research fields, namely economics, life sciences, and…

This article reports on the experiences of a novice researcher undertaking a National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) scholarship programme. A summary of the research is provided, which involved a survey of international students completing vocational education and training (VET) courses in Tasmania. Whilst many students reported…

Does the subject of research ethics take you by surprise? Does it make you somewhat uncomfortable? Does it seem to have nothing to do with your research or your practice? These are the attitudes we have encountered about research ethics among some SoTL researchers at workshops and conferences. In many cases, these researchers had conducted…

An undergraduate lecture course in Green Chemistry and Sustainability has been developed and taught to a "multidisciplinary" group of science and nonscience majors. The course introduced students to the topics of green chemistry and sustainability and also immersed them in usage of the scientific literature. Through literature…

The development of research skills and scientific reasoning underpins the mission of graduate education in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields, yet our understanding of this process is mainly drawn from self-report and faculty survey data. In this study, we empirically investigate the pattern of research skill…

Our Introduction to Research Methods course is a first-year majors course built around the idea of helping students learn to work like chemists, write like chemists, and think like chemists. We have developed this course as a hybrid hands-on/ lecture experience built around instrumentation use and report preparation. We take the product from one…

A major task of social work doctoral programs is preparing the next generation of researchers and educators in the profession. To develop competence in generating new knowledge relevant to social work practice and disseminating it to future practitioners, doctoral candidates need to master a broad and complicated set of theoretical, empirical, and…

Online peer assessment has been advocated by numerous contemporary educators. This study interviewed forty students who had experienced an online peer assessment activity for learning. Each of these students was asked to complete a research proposal in an educational method course for peer assessment. Using the online peer assessment system, the…

Being a facilitator of AR (action research) to a group of secondary school teachers in Kuching, Sarawak provided me the opportunity to engage in a second order inquiry using AR on the two years' AR learning workshops concerned. The teacher participants were asked to illustrate, using suitable GOs (graphic organizers), their understanding of what…

The University of Southern Maine (USM) designed and implemented an internal Research Cluster Seed Fund competition with the goals of building USM faculty expertise to address industry and community needs, deepening the impact of research through an interdisciplinary approach to solving problems, and leveraging external funding to sustain…

This study seeks to examine the extent to which cooperative group members' levels of coping strategies (study and examination-taking coping strategies) and the degree that heterogeneity (variability of study coping strategies and examination-taking coping strategies) predict cooperative groups' levels of achievement in research methodology…

This article reports the results of a mixed methodology analysis of the assumptions of academic staff and Masters students in an Iranian university regarding various aspects of the assessment of the Masters degree thesis, including the main objective for writing the thesis, the role of the students, supervisors and advisors in writing the…

Despite the fact that some educational researchers believe that laboratory courses promote outcomes in cognitive and affective domains in science learning, others have argued that laboratory courses are costly in relation to their value. Moreover, effective measurement of student learning in the laboratory is an area requiring further…

This paper reports on the results of an analysis of the research proposals submitted to the MOOC Research Initiative (MRI) funded by the Gates Foundation and administered by Athabasca University. The goal of MRI was to mobilize researchers to engage into critical interrogation of MOOCs. The submissions--266 in Phase 1, out of which 78 was…

The paper takes 414 graduates from ZJU in 2011 and 2012, NIT as a case, analyzing the status of their writing of graduation thesis. It is found that a considerable number of students have problems in selection and report of topics, writing of each part and debating in the whole process of graduation thesis. In view of the situation, based on the…