A dearth of literature exists about the effects of former cult involvement on family relationships. This study employed the narrative method to explore the experiences of women and children who are former members of the Children of God. We conducted in-depth interviews with 15 middle-aged women and 12 young adults and used a life course…

Narratives are important to us not only or even primarily because they tell about our past lives, but because they enable us to make sense of the present. We attempt to create coherence and give meaning to our lives by learning to read time backwards. This paper examines a counter narrative of entry into the teaching profession showing how the…

In this era of accountability and high stakes testing, district and school administrators are vigilant in their attention to student test scores and the ramifications these have for district and school performance labels. In other words, no school or district wants to be labeled "low performing." This case, based on a real situation, demonstrates…

The study reported in this paper investigated the usefulness of different instructions for guiding inexperienced older adults through interactive systems. It was designed to compare different media in relation to their social as well as their motivational impact on the elderly during the learning process. Precisely, the video was compared with…

Purpose: Using the analogy of e-learning as "the perfect storm", the aim of this paper is to explore the disruptive nature of e-learning in higher education. Design/methodology/approach: Taking a case study of a university, the paper explores the movement from an e-intensive approach to e-learning into an on-campus blended learning…

We explore how two community-based reform models align with the World Bank's "World Development Report 2004" accountability framework. Using a qualitative case study of rural Guatemalan primary schools, we examine local governance through interviews with a range of stakeholders. While both reforms appear appropriate according to the…

Disclosure, disclosure strategies, and justifications for nondisclosure for prudential, peer, multifaceted, and personal acts were assessed using a sorting task with 118 lower-middle class early and middle adolescents (Ms = 12.77 and 15.68 years). Adolescents were less involved in prudential than other behaviors, although prudential behavior was…

Using data from the Add Health, this study examined multilevel factors of adolescent smoking after controlling for the baseline smoking behavior and individual characteristics. Results showed that peer, family and school were all important life domains contextually influencing subsequent smoking behavior among adolescents. Time spent with peers,…

This study investigated whether cultural familiarity influences comprehension of short stories and whether nativizing the story or using reading activities can compensate for the lack of such familiarity. The study was conducted with 44 advanced-level students of English at a state university in Turkey. In a 2 x 2 experimental research design, the…

While research has outlined the nature of children's friendships as socialization contexts, the outline is drawn mostly in modal terms. Situational or contextual variations also need attention. This paper reports findings of studies of conflicts and the implications of conflict for friendship relations. The studies vary widely in the situations in…

Emphasizes the important contributions of systems theory in the supervision process. A case study is used to illustrate how attention to the systemic contexts of the client, the supervisee, and the supervision process itself enlarge the possibilities for helpful change. The unifying themes of many systems theories are identified, and techniques…

Findings reveal that memory retrieval at six months of age is highly specific to the setting in which the memory is acquired. This suggests that infants learn what events are associated with what places before they are able to locomote independently and acquire a spatiotemporal map of the relations between those places. (RH)

In 1 experiment, infants' ability to retain a memory for 24 hours was disrupted when infants were trained in 1 situational context and tested in another but not when they were trained in multiple contexts. In a second experiment, training in multiple contexts did not facilitate memory retrieval in a novel context after a long delay. (BC)

Considers document standardization as a way to effectively utilize information technology and discusses two ways of describing the work context of documents: process modeling and life cycle modeling. Explains a test of the modeling methods in an SGML standardization project in Finland called RASKE (from the Finnish words 'Rakenteisten…

Discusses pervasive, or ubiquitous, computing; explains the notion of context; and defines context-aware computing as the key to disperse and enmesh computation into our lives. Considers context awareness in human-computer interaction and describes the broad topic areas of the essays included in this special issue. (LRW)