Popular culture experience in video games creates avenues to practice information literacy skills and model research in a real-world setting. Video games create a unique popular culture experience where players can invest dozens of hours on one game, create characters to identify with, organize skill sets and plot points, collaborate with people…

Collaborative research is a demanding endeavor, and for a group of undergraduate students tasked with identifying their own interdisciplinary research problem, the challenges are even greater. "It was scary--we didn't know what to ask the professors, and we couldn't decide on a research question," says Miran Park, a student at the University of…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper's novel, research-oriented approach is to embed research-based activities in a core second-year course of a university business degree program to support and develop student research capabilities. Design/methodology/approach: The design draws on Boud and Prosser's work to foster participation in a…

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…

By using the case study of an advanced German course at ANU, the authors explore the main objectives of university language teaching and learning: language, subject matter, culture, research skills, and generic skills. The case study focuses on a student research project in which students investigate a topic of their own choice related to Swiss…

This article suggests that the methodology of community-based action research provides concrete strategies for fostering effective community problem solving. To argue for a community research pedagogy, the author draws upon past and present scholarship in action research and participatory action research, experiences teaching an undergraduate…

Experiential learning is a hallmark of undergraduate education programs in the agricultural sciences, and is aligned with constructivist learning theory. This interpretivist qualitative study used historical research methodology to analyze the epistemological underpinnings of constructivism and explore the construct's relationship to undergraduate…

In this article we report on the use of a graduate "Special Topics" course to provide vital research and practical laboratory experience, within the context of developing a chemical process to manufacture biodiesel from algal sources. This course contained several key components that we believe are necessary skills in graduate research: 1) a…

The Omani government attaches great importance to English in the education of Omani youth and their preparation for a multicultural world of employment. It has therefore poured large resources into English language teaching in the nation's schools, colleges and universities. Unfortunately, these efforts have not yielded gains proportionate to this…

This paper outlines the case studies of two librarians who work closely with graduate students in fine arts programs. Realizing that graduate students can often experience a unique form of research anxiety, both librarians collaborated with faculty to embed themselves into the research methods courses of their programs. Both librarians found that…

An informal research project with high local relevance was developed for a first-year sociology course at an Australian rural university campus. The project developed students' sociological insight by challenging them to investigate "truths" about their own region, rather than immediately pushing them to comprehend new and different…

In an attempt to increase college history majors' ability to analyze primary sources, the author set up a unique research project designed to tap into his students' personal interests, and which would utilize a specific method requiring them to grapple with primary source materials in an unfamiliar, though hopefully more profitable fashion. The…

The completion of a formal proposal for a dissertation research project is a standard requirement as a prelude to the process of conducting research and writing a doctoral dissertation for students who complete a doctoral degree in most academic fields including all the branches of the field of education. Many students satisfactorily complete…

Adult Basic Education and Training (ABET) and Early Childhood Education (ECE) are the stepchildren of the South African education system in terms of resource allocation and public attention, and yet vitally inform the enterprise of lifelong learning and the prospects for developing a learning nation. The paucity of research on ECE and ABET, and…

In this mixed-methods study, we investigated how doctoral students used asynchronous online discussions that were added to a face-to-face research methods course. We focused specifically on what sociocognitive tools the students used and what they thought about the value of the online discussions for their learning. Our data included three online…