This study examines pre-service primary teachers' first engagement with music education at university level in the Republic of Ireland. Data from focus group interviews and coursework present voices from the students in prolematising their learning journeys with music education. These qualitative research methods are used to investigate student…

Autism is a global phenomenon. Yet, there is a dearth of knowledge of how it is understood and its impact in low-income countries. We examined parents' and professionals' understanding of autism in one low-income country, Nepal. We conducted focus groups and semi-structured interviews with parents of autistic and non-autistic children and…

Studies suggest that the goal of convergence curriculum should be one in which students are prepared both conceptually and practically. The purpose of this study was to examine the experience of students working with new and traditional technologies to develop and produce news stories. The results indicate that participation in the course…

From a social constructivist paradigm I explored the experiences of 7 openly gay engineering students to understand how, if at all, they made sense of the intersections between their engineering and sexual orientation identities. By eliciting stories through individual and focus group interviews, a narrative approach allowed me to capture the…

Using Schatzki's practices framework as a lens, this paper reports on the practices of university students accessing learning resources at a research-intensive university in South Africa. Using a mixed-methods approach, 1001 survey responses and 6 focus groups were analysed to explore how students in three professional disciplines access learning…

Consumer, economic and financial literacy education at school is central to active and informed citizenship. Over the past decade, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has led various policy initiatives and influenced curriculum and resource development in this area. However, there remains a paucity of research exploring how…

This paper explores possibilities for marrying data visualization to online archival finding aids, which have continually suffered from usability issues in their long history. This paper describes a project in which two different data visualization models were built to replace sections of an archival finding aid. Users were then shown the models,…

Drawing on the dual perspectives of teacher educators and student-teachers, this research explores the complex learning needs of pre-service school counselling teachers (SCTs) in China. Relying on data from in-depth interviews and relevant curriculum documents, the findings of the study demonstrate four critical needs of SCTs, namely, developing a…

This paper describes one aspect of a larger scale qualitative study conducted to investigate psychology-specific issues in learning and teaching in higher education. Participants included academic psychologists from across the career spectrum and from diverse UK universities. A semi-structured focus group methodology was employed, and results were…

Attempts to measure the quality of teaching and learning have resulted in an overreliance on quantitative performance data and the normalisation of a set of reductionist practices in England's further education sector in recent years. Focusing on lesson observation as an illustrative example and drawing on data from a national study, this article…

Background: Mental health service is underutilized in the United States. Adolescent and young adults, including college students, are especially unlikely to seek professional help for mental illness. This issue presents a concern, because signs and symptoms commonly appear during this part of growth and development. Purpose: The Health Belief…

This article describes the perceptions of first-year students' subjective appraisal of their well-being before, during and after participation in an induction programme at a higher education institution (HEI). Twenty-two first-year students participated in focus group discussions (FGDs) and semi-structured individual interviews. Thematic and…

The rising cost of textbooks is influencing students' choice of courses, as well as the quality of their learning experience once they are enrolled in a course, according to recent studies. This paper builds on those studies by exploring the possible effects that textbook costs may be having on study behaviours of students at one New Zealand…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the linkage of identity of new and veteran immigrant students of the Ethiopian community in Israel, by examining their attitudes to children's literature books written simultaneously in Hebrew and Amharic. The data were collected using focus groups of Ethiopian students attending a teacher training college.…

Given family-school engagement is correlated with student academic achievement, educational researchers have long been interested in the construct. However, measuring parental engagement is deceptively challenging. The concept includes school-based engagement, home-based learning support, and family-school communication. In this article we focus…