Ralph LaRossa's (2012) article on the multidimensional world of qualitative research provides family scientists with a set of innovative tools to guide writing and reviewing. He proffered an engaging challenge: to view the "Journal of Marriage and Family" ("JMF") as a meeting place of scholars, a thought community (Zerubavel, 1997), even a culture…

This article provides a critical perspective on the increasing involvement of young people in participatory evaluation as well as identifies the factors to consider when designing a youth-led evaluation project. Through this avenue, young people will increase their participation in organizational development and community change. Youth-led…

Participatory methodologies are often favoured in education research. This study aimed to determine collaborative partnership trends between education researchers and teachers in order to understand the use of participatory theory and practice in education studies. Seven symposium presentations by education scholars from various higher education…

One of the issues that have continued to attract the attention of Open and Distance Learning (ODL) educators, scholars and researchers at the Zimbabwe Open University (ZOU) is the question of quality in the assessment of students' research work. This study was part of a series of studies, into issues of quality, currently being conducted at the…

A crucial challenge in terms of research methods in philosophy of education is that of combining philosophical ways of analyzing and arguing, with the dialogical and pluralist way of thinking needed in educational research. In this article I describe how I dealt with this challenge in my research project focusing on educational implications of the…

This article presents the perspective of both non-disabled and developmentally disabled people working together in a research project on poverty and disability. Our study used a participatory action research approach that challenges the norm of exclusion in the research process. Control of the research agenda has been inclusive and shared to…

The notion of Indigenous epistemologies and "ways of knowing" continues to be undervalued within various academic disciplines, particularly those who continue to draw upon "scientific" approaches that colonise Indigenous peoples today. This paper will examine the politics of contested knowledge from the perspective of three…

The author reports on the U.S. Department of Education's "What Works Clearinghouse" that goes beyond "gold standard" research and sets standards for accepting other types of studies. As part of the Institute of Education Sciences' push to make research more relevant to educators, the federal clearinghouse has devised standards by which it can…

This paper presents a case study of students' awareness, experiences and perceptions of research in a "new" university in the UK. The findings are based on a questionnaire of almost 200 students and five small group interviews. Many of the students participating in this research perceived clear benefits to their learning from staff…

Designed for students and educational professionals researching students' movement into and through higher education, "Crafting and Conducting Research on Student Transitions" is a concise resource, describing both qualitative and quantitative methods. The authors walk readers through the process of selecting a topic, designing a study,…

This timely book takes up the challenge of maintaining programs in the arts in the face of unrelenting pressure from two directions; the increasing focus on literacy and numeracy in schools, teamed with the cut-backs in public funding that often affect the arts most severely. Drawing on the wealth of evidence already available on the impact of the…

Drawing on primary data and adjunct material, this article adopts a critical self-reflexive approach to a three-year, Australian Research Council-funded project that explored themes around "employment citizenship" for high school students in Queensland. The article addresses three overlapping areas that reflect some of the central…

We incorporated an active, collaborative-based research project in our undergraduate Research Methods course for first-year sports medicine majors. Working in small groups, students identified a research question, generated a hypothesis to be tested, designed an experiment, implemented the experiment, analyzed the data, and presented their…

In an effort to teach students the basic knowledge of research methods and the realities of conducting research in the context of agencies in the community, faculty developed and implemented a service learning model for teaching research and program evaluation to foundation-year MSW students. A year-long foundation course was designed in which one…

3D virtual worlds can and have been used as a meeting place for distance education courses. Virtual worlds allow for group learning of the kind enjoyed by students gathered in a virtual classroom, where they know they are in a communal space, they are aware of the social process of learning and are affected by the presence and behaviour of their…