Currently, there is no agreement among scientists and science educators on whether heat should be defined as a "process of energy transfer" or "form of energy." For example, students may conceive of heat as "molecular kinetic energy," but the interpretation of this alternative conception is dependent on educational…

All students, from college freshmen to advanced graduate students, have asked themselves, "Will this decision make me happy?" The vast majority of them have been wrong. Affective forecasting, the process of predicting future feelings, is a topic of great interest to students due to its applicable and highly relatable nature. This article…

Several points of contrast are highlighted between design-based research (DBR) as often practiced within the learning sciences and design partnerships inspired by cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT). It is argued that learning scientists can improve their work by learning from CHAT-inspired DBR in 4 particular ways: (a) by recognizing the…

Place-based and place-responsive approaches to outdoor learning and education are developing in many countries but there is dearth of theoretically-supported methodologies to take a more explicit account of place in research in these areas. In response, this article outlines one theoretical framing for place-responsive methodologies for…

Purpose: Nonexperimental research, defined as any kind of quantitative or qualitative research that is not an experiment, is the predominate kind of research design used in the social sciences. How to unambiguously and correctly present the results of nonexperimental research, however, remains decidedly unclear and possibly detrimental to applied…

The subject of the article is of current interest nowadays in the conditions of spiritual and moral crisis provoked by the deep social and economic transformations occurring in modern society. Such public situation makes fall into a muse about the revival of lost cultural wealth, about moral and patriotic reference points in youth education. The…

Research in academic libraries has recently seen an increase in the use of ethnographic-based methods to collect data. Primarily used to learn about library users and their interaction with spaces and resources, the methods are proving particularly useful to academic libraries. The data ethnographic methods retrieve is rich, context specific, and…

Leadership style is the general way a leader behaves towards his subordinates for attaining objectives. There are two major dimensions of leadership i.e. transformational leadership and transactional leadership. The objective of the present study was to find out the relationship between leadership styles of principals and job satisfaction of…

In the article the systems of continuing pedagogical education in Great Britain, Canada and the USA have been characterized. The main objectives are defined as the theoretical analysis of scientific-pedagogical literature, which highlights different aspects of the problem under research; identification of the common and distinctive features of the…

Social phenomenological analysis is presented as a research method to study gallery talks or guided tours in art museums. The research method is based on the philosophical considerations of Edmund Husserl and sociological/social science concepts put forward by Max Weber and Alfred Schuetz. Its starting point is the everyday lifeworld; the…

Reflective practice and inquiry are aspects of teacher professional practice that characterise teachers as learners. Reflective practice in some form is considered in contemporary education as an essential activity for teachers and teacher educators. "Inquiry as professional development" and "inquiry as research", on the other…

In the era of Big Data, because of diminishing cost of data collection and storage, a large number of statistical tests may even possibly be conducted all together by a high school student to seek for some "exciting" new scientific findings. In this article, we propose an interesting approach to introduce students to some important…

Conducting large multi-site research within universities highlights inconsistencies between universities in approaches, requirements and responses of research ethics committees. Within the context of a social science research study, we attempted to obtain ethical approval from 101 universities across England to recruit students for a short online…

Single case studies can provide vital contributions to theory-testing in social science studies. Particularly, by applying the process-tracing method, case studies can test theoretical frameworks through a rigorous research design that ensures substantial empirical leverage. While most scholarly contributions on process-tracing focus on either…

In this article, we describe ways that the Delphi technique can be extended from its more traditional approaches and processes in order to make it a tool for scholars using participatory methods. This innovative proposed approach is called the change-oriented Delphi. We describe this innovative approach using an example from our own work to create…