Hugh Heclo's recent book "On Thinking Institutionally" (Paradigm Publishers, 2008) analyzes changes that have taken place in the past half century in how North Americans tend to think and act in institutions. The volume is receiving particular attention as it can be applied to higher education and to religious denominations, and so deserves…

Like other minority groups in North America, Muslim Americans have been largely ignored in the psychological literature. The overwhelming pressures faced by this group, including surveillance, hate crimes, and institutional discrimination, stimulate an urgent need for psychologists to better understand and ensure the well-being of this population.…

This study investigates how the attitudes of 60 Korean university students towards five varieties of English are affected by the identification of the speaker's nationality and ethnicity. The study employed both a verbal guise technique and questions eliciting overt beliefs and preferences related to learning English. While the majority of the…

The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) at the Brigham Young University website has been used in the English as a Foreign language (EFL) classroom to help learners better understand how language works at different levels of analysis and also to develop their writing skills. However, it also allows learners to explore culture-related…

The fact that people with minimal linguistic skill can manage in unfamiliar or reduced linguistic environments suggests that there are universal mechanisms of meaning construction that operate at a level well beyond the particular structure or semantics of any one language. The authors examine this possibility in the domain of discourse by…

Male teamsport athletes have traditionally been described as some of the most homophobic and femphobic men in North American culture. However, in this ethnographic research of an education-based soccer team at a small Catholic university in a rural part of Middle America, I use inclusive masculinity theory to highlight that a softer version of…

Because of the practical, theoretical, and legal implications of differential item functioning (DIF) for organizational assessments, studies of measurement equivalence are a necessary first step before scores can be compared across individuals from different groups. However, commonly recommended criteria for evaluating results from these analyses…

Despite the dominance of instrumental, psychological approaches to educational theory and practice in North America, a different understanding of the value and dynamics of education is often articulated informally in cultural representations (e.g. fiction and feature films) and in personal recollections. This alternative understanding is one in…

This paper discusses the unique barriers and learning difficulties encountered by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean international students when they study at institutions of higher education in the US. These learning difficulties arise because of inability of some American professors to use discourse markers, summarize at the end of lectures, write…

Teacher authority has long been recognized as one of the critical factors that contribute to the formation of effective learning circumstances (Haywood-Metz, 2006). A survey was developed based on Dornbusch and Scott's (1975) theoretical framework of distinction between formal authority and informal authority, named "The Attitude towards…

The present study addresses gender gaps in North American research productivity, which may be influenced by personal and family variables, as well as professional and work-related variables. The study was conducted as part of the "Changing Academic Profession (CAP) International Survey", conducted in 2007-08. Using articles as indicator…

This paper analyzes the ideological orientations of Canadian university professors based on a unique 2000 study of a representative sample of Canadian academics (n=3,318). After summarizing methodological problems with extant research on this subject, and tentatively comparing the political views of Canadian and American academics, the paper…

This paper gives an account of a teaching experiment on absolute value inequalities, whose aim was to identify characteristics of an approach that would realize the potential of the topic to develop theoretical thinking in students enrolled in prerequisite mathematics courses at a large, urban North American university. The potential is…

The international project described in this paper has been inspired by the Trans-Atlantic and Pacific Projects (TAPP). By 2013, the TAPP network had connected classes in writing, usability testing and/or translation at three universities in the US and several partner universities in Europe, Africa and China. The pedagogical import of these forms…

Granted the fact that different cultures have different speaking styles, knowledge of these styles can help people grasp the essence of social cultural knowledge to communicate with others more successfully. In this regard, the present paper aims at comparing the use of speech act of gratitude in Persian and Chinese EFL learners and English native…