The role of social support in child welfare policy and practice continues to engender widespread debate. Yet the moral and philosophical underpinnings of this topical area have received less attention in the literature. This is of concern, not least because academic debates on the "politics of identity" have a significant contribution to make to…

As university lecturers select and sequence materials for their teaching, a linear structure emerges by default. Such a structure is made explicit within PowerPoint presentations and may even be amplified as PowerPoint invites the lecturer to reduce content to a bulleted format. Such linear sequences have been related to passive, surface…

This microethnographic case study focuses on patterns of interpretation and decision making of undergraduate preservice teachers as they participated in observations, co-teaching, and teaching in elementary schools in northern Mexico. At the core, this study explores the deeply embedded assumptions preservice teachers may bring to new…

This highly readable text demystifies the qualitative research process--and helps readers conceptualize their own studies--by organizing the different research paradigms and traditions into coherent clusters. Real-world examples and firsthand perspectives illustrate the research process; instructive exercises and activities build on each other so…

This essay examines the impact of WAC/WID methodology and technology in an Education Capstone Course for Childhood Education majors at LaGuardia Community College/CUNY. Written discourse and ePortfolio development of students enrolled in the writing-intensive capstone course is examined within the framework of Veronica Boix Mansilla's (2004) work…

Given the importance of reflection in educators' practice, school leaders should be able to both facilitate teacher reflection and model reflective practice. This action research study examined whether or not emerging school leaders demonstrate the ability to reflect on daily practice and decision-making. Data from three classes of prospective…

There is a distinct divide between theory and practice in American science education. Research indicates that a constructivist philosophy, in which students construct their own knowledge, is conductive to learning, while in many cases teachers continue to present science in a more traditional manner. This study sought to explore possible…

The purpose of this study was to explore students' response to a multicultural course for graduate level speech-language pathology preservice candidates grounded in a sociocultural conceptual framework. This study will describe: (1) the innovative instructional methods used for the delivery of multicultural course content, (2) student's…

Why are students' personal lives immersed in technology, but their school experiences quite the opposite? Although computers and the Internet have been used steadily even before this generation of students was born, K-12 classrooms still operate in much the same fashion as 100 years ago. Educators give many reasons for not using the latest…

This study investigates the effects of a competency-oriented course and the effects of feedback training on students' reflection skills. Thirty-one nursing students enrolled in a conventional course with lectures and assignments following a traditional test. Subsequently, they enrolled in a competency-oriented course, which included more…

This action research combined qualitative and quantitative techniques to investigate two different types of writing assignments in an introductory undergraduate statistics course. The assignments were written in response to the same set of prompts but in two different ways: homework journal assignments or initial posts to a computer discussion…

Communicative language teaching (CLT) is promoted in teacher education programmes around the world, although the appropriateness of this methodology in contexts outside the English-speaking West has been questioned, often from a theoretical perspective. In fact, very little empirical research has been conducted into the practical knowledge of CLT…

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…

The design of virtual learning environments for post-secondary instruction is rapidly increasing among public and private universities. While the quantity of online courses over the past 10 years has exponentially increased, the quality of these courses has not. As universities increase their online teaching activities, real concern about the best…

This article reports research concerning the effective use of video editing to help cultivate novice teachers' reflective practice. The study reported here is part of a larger body of research on video-enhanced teacher reflection. For this study, we used a qualitative research design to examine two guided reflection activities for two groups of…