Classroom instruction may be affected by school contexts that are increasingly performance-driven because of legislative demands. Interpreting this as a need to investigate the relationships between school context and classroom practice, this study took a "top-down" approach by examining contextual elements of school goal structure and teacher…

Within the past 2 decades, the education services industry has been characterized as going through a period of high tuition with an increased reliance on the use of loan financing. This study examines the impact of this high-tuition, high-loan approach, especially as it relates to the role of socioeconomic status on educational choice within…

Harmonic priming studies have shown that a musical context with its tonal center influences target chord processing. In comparison with targets following baseline contexts, which do not establish a specific tonal center, processing is facilitated for a strongly related target functioning as the tonic, but inhibited for unrelated (out-of-key) and…

This research investigates the role of experience in relation to teachers' beliefs and practices. The study adopted a social-cultural constructivist perspective using an interpretive approach. The research was guided by teachers' interpretations of their experiences related to teaching science through Science-Technology-Society (STS) issues. These…

This article explores the interaction between the work and lives of five religious qualitative researchers whose research studies investigate both culture and religion. The ways their personal backgrounds, experiences, and values affect their choice of research topics and their relationships with research participants and with data, are revealed…

This paper suggests new directions understanding the impact of international students in schools. It is concerned with the ways that community representatives discuss these students and their impact on the community of the school. Recent literatures describe communities such as those of schools as ones of perception and materiality whereby some…

This paper focuses on the process of literacy socialization in several 5th grade reading groups. Through close analysis of spoken interaction, which centers on a heavily illustrated, non-fiction text, the paper proposes that these reading groups can be seen as complex sites of socialization to the values associated with essayist literacy (i.e.,…

This study reports a qualitative phenomenological investigation of anger and anger-related aggression in the context of the lives of individual women. Semistructured interviews with five women are analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. This inductive approach aims to capture the richness and complexity of the lived experience of…

This study examines the role of environment in the development of pragmatic comprehension. It tracks two groups of Japanese students of English: 60 students in a college in Japan (English as a foreign language [EFL] learners) and 57 students in a college in the United States (English as a second language [ESL] learners). The learners completed a…

The primary focus of research that the authors have undertaken at New Mexico State University for the past several years can be summed up with the question--are Presidential Libraries educational institutions or are they simply political monuments and messages? The authors have conducted extensive investigations involving visitations to ten…

This concluding commentary highlights common themes that emerged across the chapters in this volume. We identify strengths and limitations of the core competencies framework and discuss the importance of context, culture, and development for understanding the role of the core competencies in preventing risk behavior in adolescence. We also outline…

This chapter begins with a retrospective look at governance in community colleges based on a working understanding of governance as a correlate of decision making. In its simplest form, governance is "a process for distributing authority, power, and influence in decision making among constituencies" (Alfred and Smydra, 1985, pp. 201-202). What…

For more than 20 years, the Ways of Coping Scale (WOCS) has been used extensively to measure coping. Yet beyond the original psychometric data, few studies have reexamined its properties utilizing the enormous body of research generated on the WOCS. Reliability has been assumed to be consistent as an attribute of the test. This study used…

This research explores the perceived exchange of social support resources of young, midlife, and older adults in the United States and Japan, and how perceptions of exchange may moderate attributions of control, difficulty, and success in attaining important life-goals. A survey was administered to participants in the United States and Japan who…

This paper explores ways in which the research design of an anonymous online discussion forum on sexual orientation and schooling fostered the creation, maintenance and/or disruption of linguistic constructions of participant identity. The paper focuses on the presentation of self and the performance of sex-gender-sexuality within a research…