Peer relationships are an integral part of social work education. This study examined three types of social ties (academic, friendship, and professional) among first-semester students in a cohort-based MSW program. Data were collected three times during the semester and analyzed using social network analysis. By semester's end, students had an…

As national borders dissipate and technology allows different cultures and nationalities to communicate on a regular basis, more individuals are self-identifying as a global citizen. Using Social Network Analysis and multi-level modelling, this study explores factors associated with global citizen affinity and finds that education plays an…

As social behavior moves increasingly online, the study of social behavior has followed. Online traces of social systems, whether to study online behavior directly or the online traces of offline activity, have made possible previously unavailable empirical analyses of people, groups and organizations. However, practically observing any social…

This study investigates a possible way to analyze chat data from collaborative learning environments using epistemic network analysis and topic modeling. A 300-topic general topic model built from TASA (Touchstone Applied Science Associates) corpus was used in this study. 300 topic scores for each of the 15,670 utterances in our chat data were…

In this article, we analyze international students' perceptions of their needs when going abroad. The trend toward internationalization and the increase in mobility drives the agenda for globalization in many higher education institutions, and in some cases without any clear strategy for identifying the possible needs of international students.…

Research on the patterns of international student mobility and the dynamics shaping these patterns has been dominated by studies reflecting a Western orientation, discourse, and understanding. Considering political, economic, cultural, historical, and ecological factors, this study argues that international student mobility is not only an issue of…

Purpose: Secondary school leadership provides multiple challenges in terms of the diversity of tasks, multiple demands on time, balancing communities and attending to instructional programming. An emerging scholarship suggests the importance of a distributed instructional leadership approach to high school leadership. However, what has been less…

One goal of Erdkinder schools is for students and teachers to provide academic assistance to their peers, particularly to less-knowledgeable ones. However, traditional educational evaluations do not provide a means to investigate the exchange of academic help. This study piloted the use of social network analysis to describe academic assistance…

Undergraduate students should be able to identify relationships between agricultural and natural resources (ANR) issues to be prepared for ANR sector jobs. The purpose of this study was to determine if communication courses focused on teaching about ANR issues influenced students' understanding of the relational nature of these issues. A…

Effective science teaching critically requires content focused professional development (PD), particularly in life sciences where content evolves rapidly. How subject matter knowledge related to teaching (SCK) is most effectively incorporated into PD has not been investigated. We studied how a professional learning community of high school…

Educators are realizing that individuals working in isolation can't adequately address the teaching and learning problems that face us today. Collective action networks are needed. Sharing networks use collective energy to support individual action and agency, whereas execution networks typically address complex problems that require sustained…

When designing a chemistry education research study it is important that the researcher select or create assessment instruments and methodologies that are valid. This ensures that correct interpretations can be made from the data collected using the instrument or methodology. The two studies described here introduce a novel method for…

This paper used a novel literature review approach--co-citation network analysis--to illuminate the latent structure of 87 empirical papers in the field of young children's learning with technology (YCLT). Based on the document co-citation analysis, a total of 206 co-citation relationships among the 87 papers were identified and then graphically…

There is an emerging trend in higher education for the adoption of massive open online courses (MOOCs). However, despite this interest in learning at scale, there has been limited work investigating the impact MOOCs can play on student learning. In this study, we adopt a novel approach, using language and discourse as a tool to explore its…

Networked learning and learning networks are commonplace concepts in most contemporary discourse on learning in the 21st century. This special issue provides a collection of studies that address the need for a growing body of empirical work to extent the limited understanding of the use and benefits of networks in relation to learning and…