This research project case discusses the methodology and research tools used in an action research study that was designed to support students' intrapersonal intelligence as defined by Howard Gardner (1993) in both the dimensions of self-knowledge and the cognitive capacities of executive function (Moran & Gardner, 2007). This involved…

The following case study describes a research project that used survey data from the National Survey of Student Engagement to examine the relationship between student engagement in higher education and institutional rank as reported by "U.S. News," "Forbes," and "Washington Monthly." The research article was presented…

This case study reports my experiences of a PhD project applying the microgenetic approach to study changes in students' conceptual structures as they developed understanding of topics in physics. The microgenetic approach involves sampling (referring to the frequency of application of data collection probes) a phenomenon at a rate which is high…

All research accounts are partial. Who we are--our biographies, experiences, ideological stances, and so on--affects the entirety of the research process. Who we are shapes what types of research questions we find interesting, how we frame our research objectives, how we collect data, how we analyze these data, and how we present our findings. In…

During the 2014-2015 academic year, WestEd hired us as research interns at the West Comprehensive Center in Phoenix, AZ. As PhD students, our task was to conduct a collective case study on two local education agencies in Arizona that participated in a 2-year school turnaround specialist program. The goal of the project was to gain a deeper…

We make sense of experiences of our own and others through different forms of stories -- movies, TV dramas, documentaries, books, songs, as well as stories that are told and re-told within our families and cultures. Our experiences are fragmented and happen in different places over the course of our lives. By putting stories together in a plot, we…

Schools are awash in data, and teachers are being asked to gather data in a myriad of high-tech and low-tech ways. But gathering is not analyzing, and without analysis there is little reason to gather the data in the first place. Teachers need data-collection systems that lend themselves to rapid analysis and action. This article presents several…

This case describes the research process followed by two professors who chose to study student outcomes in our online accounting classrooms. Motivated by the discovery of a possible anomaly in classroom outcomes, we decided to look further. We thought the anomaly might be explained by student procrastination. If our perception proved true, the…

This case study describes the adoption of a mixed-methods approach to explore provision for 2-year-olds in England at a time when funding for free places for disadvantaged children became available. A literature review was carried out to find out about aspects of early childhood provision considered important for 2-year-old children's development,…

In this case, I discuss my progression from ethnography toward multimodal ethnography as a necessary methodology to study multiliterate and multimodal lives. I view daily life, social interactions, and meaning-making practices as inherently multimodal. By multimodal, I mean that individuals continually read, interpret, and create meanings that…

In this article, I describe the processes involved in designing and carrying out a case study project. The case study focuses on a science teacher, Donald, who was undertaking an inquiry-based curriculum change to an advanced chemistry course in a specialized science, technology, engineering, and mathematics school. I describe the groundwork…

The aim of this case study is to highlight the importance of piloting or pre-testing the research design (in this case, semi-structured interviews and narratives). Most textbooks offer minimal guidance about pre-testing the research design, and published reports rarely report whether the research was piloted and, if so, what were the results.…

This project was a qualitative longitudinal research study into cultural and structural change in an English secondary school. The schools' consistent underperformance led to its conversion to "academy" status as part of a development under the Labour administration of 1997-2010. The Labour policy for academization was designed, first,…

The case study presented here highlights a unique method of collecting data for phenomenological qualitative studies. Drawing from many scholars in qualitative research, Irving Seidman developed this method of in-depth interviewing with attributes of validity and reliability. It is a time-intensive method in which three interviews are conducted,…

Phenomenography is a research approach that seeks to identify "variation" in experiences of a particular phenomenon among a sample population. It includes particular procedures for writing research questions, designing data collection tools, and analyzing findings. Sustainability in higher education has attracted considerable interest in…