In this article I draw on an ethnographic case study that examined mas' makers' perceptions of the learning/teaching practices at work in the production of costumes for Trinidad and Tobago's annual Carnival celebrations. During the 2005 Carnival season I spent four months in the field, my country of birth, and collected data through participant…

This study examines the impact of prior learning experience on students' approaches to learning (SAL). It compares SAL of accounting students admitted to university in Australia on the basis of Institutes of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) qualifications (TAFE-to-university) and through direct entry mode (Year 12-to-university). The…

Backward inhibition (BI) refers to a reaction time cost incurred when returning to a recently abandoned task compared to returning to a task not recently performed. The effect has been proposed to reflect an inhibitory mechanism that aids transition from one task to another. The question arises as to precisely what aspects of a task may be…

Horn's parallel analysis (PA) is the method of consensus in the literature on empirical methods for deciding how many components/factors to retain. Different authors have proposed various implementations of PA. Horn's seminal 1965 article, a 1996 article by Thompson and Daniel, and a 2004 article by Hayton, Allen, and Scarpello all make assertions…

Many scholars have proposed concepts relevant to spatial reference. Herskovits (1982) proposed that the topological concepts support, contiguity and containment are basic in English, while Levinson et al.'s (2003) examination of nine unrelated languages revealed that the concept attachment is primary. Neither of these proposals is confirmed in…

Critical thinking (CT) has been of longstanding interest among scholars, educators, and others who are concerned with thinking skills. The Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA) is the oldest and among the most widely used and studied CT measure. It was constructed around five subscales (or CT skills): inference, recognition of…

Two reasons may be responsible for the poor grasp of the linguistic concepts related to literacy acquisition by preservice and in-service teachers: a lack of attention given to such concepts by teacher educators (college faculty members) and a lack of relevant information provided in the textbooks used in college courses. In an earlier study, the…

This paper conducts research on the connotations and characteristics of evaluation indicator system for teaching quality of college teachers, constructs the contents of the evaluation indicator system for teaching quality of college teachers and applies the contents in the practice of teaching quality monitoring and evaluation so as to prove their…

One of the most important steps in the qualitative research process is analysis of data. The purpose of this article is to provide elements for understanding multiple types of qualitative data analysis techniques available and the importance of utilizing more than one type of analysis, thus utilizing data analysis triangulation, in order to…

This article proposes an instance-based theoretical framework to account for the influence of both contexts and definitions on learning new word meanings and reports 2 studies that examine hypotheses about learning from context. One is that variation in contexts is important for allowing core meaning features of a word to emerge. The second is…

The current study reports preliminary information gathered about First Nations English dialects in Canada and considers implications for speech-language pathology practice. Information was gathered from literature searches and forums of First Nations and non-First Nations speech-language pathologists, developmentalists, and linguists. The…

Institutional vision is a philosophical template--a concept of what, at its best, a college or university is like and the kinds of human beings that institution is attempting to cultivate. A content analysis of the institutional vision of a nation wide sample of Catholic schools was performed and key linguistic components found to constitute a…

Generalized Structured Component Analysis (GSCA) was recently introduced by Hwang and Takane (2004) as a component-based approach to path analysis with latent variables. The parameters of GSCA are estimated by pooling data across respondents under the implicit assumption that they all come from a single, homogenous group. However, as has been…

Qualitative researchers in school psychology have a multitude of analyses available for data. The purpose of this article is to present several of the most common methods for analyzing qualitative data. Specifically, the authors describe the following 18 qualitative analysis techniques: method of constant comparison analysis, keywords-in-context,…

A strategy for systematic analysis of the contribution of each component of an instructional program to a prescribed outcome is described. The strategy is based upon a multiple baseline experimental design. (Author)