Student feedback is essential to improving the quality of instruction in higher education. This article chronicles the process by which an end-of-course reflection exercise was used to gather additional feedback from students and to determine learning outcomes in online course for adult learners. Students were given guiding questions for the…

This study examined preservice teachers' understanding of the syntactic structures of inquiry; in particular, what it means to give priority to evidence and how to use evidence to construct explanations. Data were collected from student journals, the course syllabus, the assignment description, and weekly lesson plans. The use of content analysis…

This paper reports on the analysis of state statutes and department of education regulations in fifty states for changes in teacher evaluation in use since the passage of No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. We asked what the policy activity for teacher evaluation is in state statutes and department of education regulations, how these changes in…

Past research has shown the variations of students' conceptions of learning, but little has been especially undertaken to address students' conceptions of web-based learning and to make comparisons between students' conceptions of learning in general and their conceptions of web-based learning in particular. By interviewing 83 Taiwanese college…

The purpose of this research was to understand how student art teachers perceive the contribution to their training of community service in various frameworks, such as a prison and a drug rehabilitation center. The research was conducted in 2006-2007 in the School of Art at Beit Berl College, Israel, in two stages. In the first stage, six…

This paper tackles the problem of understanding whether Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) is taking place and whether students are developing SRL abilities in a Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) environment. To this end, the authors propose a taxonomy of indicators based on Zimmerman's learning cycle model, with several adaptations…

A sample of 40 suicide notes were analyzed for motivational content in relation to an existential-constructivist theory of suicide. Results generally supported the 4 theoretical categories of somatic, relational, spiritual, and psychological motivations, with 39 notes having content that could be classified according to the aforementioned…

Objectives: This study used content analysis to explore how much and what type of advertising is present in television programming aimed at toddlers and preschool-aged children and what methods of persuasion are being used to sell products and to promote brands to the youngest viewers. Methods: Four randomly selected, 4-hour blocks (9 AM to 1 PM)…

In 1995 it became mandatory to establish individual educational plans (IEPs) for children with special educational needs in the Swedish compulsory school. On the basis of the pupils' needs, such a plan should contain information about the pupils' school situation and performance, the class, teaching etc. The aim of this article was to study how…

Our previous studies have shown that Portuguese primary school pupils and teachers have three main difficulties in the representation of the digestion process: the sequence of the digestive tract, blood absorption, and the relationship of the digestive function with other human functions. In this study we analysed the topic of digestion in 63…

Word problems in mathematics seem to constantly pose learning difficulties for all kinds of students. Recent work in math education (for example, [Lakoff, G. & Nunez, R. E. (2000). "Where mathematics comes from: How the embodied mind brings mathematics into being." New York: Basic Books]) suggests that the difficulties stem from an…

Content analysis is a powerful empirical method for analyzing text, a method that technical communicators can use on the job and in their research. Content analysis can expose hidden connections among concepts, reveal relationships among ideas that initially seem unconnected, and inform the decision-making processes associated with many technical…

The author discusses findings from a content analysis of a national sample of 127 service-learning course syllabi to illustrate assessment strategies. Although the results demonstrate the influence of Campus Compact's recommendation to use reflective assessment in service-learning courses, the use of reflection in the syllabi varies widely.…

In CSCL research, collaboration through chat has primarily been studied in dyadic settings. This article discusses three issues that emerged during the development of a multi-dimensional coding procedure for small-group chat communication: (a) the unit of analysis and unit fragmentation, (b) the reconstruction of the response structure and (c)…

Where some of the papers in this volume deal with nation building in the democratizing former East European states in the wider ideological context of liberal democratic thought, this paper aims to present a view of democracy and democratization from an alternative, "Asian" perspective. South East Asian nations, such as Singapore, have…