This study aimed at understanding the essence of reading and language learning by bilinguals and trilinguals college students. The study is based on data from two separate yet related studies that were completed. The study used interviews as a qualitative means to glean the views of Arab bilinguals (n=10) and African trilinguals (n=3). The study…

Trust, as a philosophical concept in education, seems largely taken for granted, either because it is embedded in other discourses, or is self-evidently assumed to be one on which there is general agreement and understanding. Its associated notions, such as confidence and belief, have counters in such concepts as disappointment and betrayal. These…

Learning to parent sensitively and safely can be challenging for adults with childhood abuse and neglect experiences. Such childhood experiences are prevalent among incarcerated parents whose ability to parent their own children is also limited by separation from them. Several prisons have developed programs to foster pro-social parenting skills…

In the day-to-day workplace teachers direct their own learning, but little is known about what drives their decisions about what they would like to learn. These decisions are assumed to be influenced by teachers' current professional concerns. Also, teachers in different professional life phases have different reasons for engaging in professional…

In this design experiment study, we investigated the problem: What conditions might foster students' discernment of a critical aspect--variation in unidirectional change (e.g., discerning a "decreasing" increase)? At a public middle school in a large US city, we led a sequence of three days of whole class lessons, followed by task-based,…

This article draws on Marcia's model that defines four statuses of adolescents' identity formation to examine adolescent moral and civic identity formation. Interviews were conducted with 23 students at three Hong Kong senior secondary schools to address the following research question: How does community service help adolescents develop their…

Teachers' instructional practices surrounding written assignments have been little researched, despite writing remaining the primary means of assessment in higher education, including postgraduate professional development programmes. In this paper, we report a study that explored what a sample of lecturers in a Master of Education programme at an…

This research focuses on the perspectives of university-based teacher educators regarding their roles at a School of Education in Trinidad and Tobago. It investigates the tensions between their own expectations of the position they were employed for and their perspectives of the institution's expectations of them. This focus adds to the findings…

Policy texts are representations of practice that both reflect and shape the world around them. There is, however, little higher education research that critically analyses the impact of higher education policy on educational developers and educational development practice. Extending methods from critical discourse analysis by combining textual…

This article examines how Finnish universities and other higher education institutes have responded to the challenges posed by rapid changes in the world of work and societies all over Europe, particularly with reference to the development of generic skills. The data were collected by means of individual and group interviews at three Finnish…

The purpose of this grounded theory study was to discover the process of social identity development for adolescent high school women's choir participants. Purposive maximum variation sampling was used to identify three public high school women's choirs where 54 interviews were conducted with 40 different public school singers. Three waves of data…

In the new national core curriculum for Finnish preschool and basic education, rationales for supporting pupil participation are framed by the goal of developing school communities by listening to pupils' perspectives, the social nature of teaching and learning and pupils' participatory role in planning, implementing and evaluating their own…

The aim of this study is to determine factors affecting the sustainability of educational changes. With this purpose in mind, exploratory sequential mixed methods design was used. During the first phase of the study, 18 teachers and school administrators were interviewed. In the second phase, a questionnaire was administered to 398 teachers and…

Knowing when students have the prerequisite knowledge to be able to read and understand a mathematical text is a perennial concern for instructors. Using text describing Newton's method and Vinner's notion of concept image, we exemplify how prerequisite knowledge influences understanding. Through clinical interviews with first-semester calculus…

In the higher education literature, there seems to be a growing consensus that contemporary higher education institutions (HEIs) are trapped in conformity. From a new institutional perspective, higher education scholars argue that HEIs tend to comply with widely endorsed institutionalized values (e.g. academic excellence) and this widespread…