The push for evidence-based practice in education has led to a range of initiatives aimed at bridging the gap between research, policy and practice. Among these are the establishment of brokerage agencies with a mission to synthesise the findings of educational research. This development has been the subject of extensive controversy over the last…

This study focuses on the qualitative research interview, an essential tool frequently used in the human and social sciences, conducted with children having communication disorders. Two distinct populations are addressed--children with intellectual disability and deaf children without related disabilities--with the aim of identifying the main…

This article is a collaboration by the lead faculty member in a Masters program in Intercultural Studies and students who completed the program under his aegis. This article presents the program's approach to its research course sequence, an approach involving the integration of interdisciplinary and qualitative research. The authors first provide…

Health system managers and policy makers need timely access to high quality, policy-relevant systematic reviews. Our objectives were to obtain managers' and policy makers' feedback about user-friendly summaries of systematic reviews and about tools related to supporting or assessing their use. Our interviews identified that participants prefer key…

Background: The literature on the prevalence of mental disorders affecting children and adolescents has expanded significantly over the last three decades around the world. Despite the field having matured significantly, there has been no meta-analysis to calculate a worldwide-pooled prevalence and to empirically assess the sources of…

Background/Context: Within the context of four locally funded research projects, the researcher was asked to disseminate the findings of her narrative inquiries not to the research community, which had previously been the case, but to the practice and philanthropic communities. This, in turn, created a representational crisis because practitioners…

E-learning includes the use of the internet for accessing learning materials, interacting with learning content and with instructors and students to obtain support during the learning process in order to gain knowledge and personal meaning and to grow. It occurs when students have electronic access to resources and where they are in regular online…

An initial research step, developing an effective interview strategy, presents unique challenges for novice and master research alike. To focus qualitative research in the human ecology of the study, the strategy presented in this paper used an initial interview protocol and preanalysis process, called meta-analysis, prior to developing the formal…

This article reports on an analysis of person attributes of e-learning practitioners at the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT). Findings from a study of the latent structure of an e-learning practitioner construct, are presented to illuminate the characteristics and personal profiles of the e-learning practitioners at TUT. Rich sources of…

Three major methods of survey research, face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, and mail questionnaires, are compared with respect to the quality of the data. The literature on experimental comparisons of these methods is reviewed, and the effects of the mode of data collection on aspects of data quality are examined. The effects of the…

I encourage the editors of and contributors to "Language Assessment Quarterly" to continue, and to extend, three directions that are integral to the development of the field of language assessment: (a) to broaden the scope of inquiry and contexts that inform knowledge about language assessment; (b) to deepen the theoretical premises and…

Background: Both the professional and the general media have recently published concerns about an "epidemic" of child and adolescent depression. Reasons for this concern include (1) increases in antidepressant prescriptions, (2) retrospective recall by successive birth cohorts of adults, (3) rising adolescent suicide rates until 1990,…