The present two studies investigated whether students' development of epistemic beliefs about the educational sciences (study A; N = 152) and linguistics (study B; N = 150) can be affected by authentic learning activities in an out-of-school lab (OSL). OSLs aim to engage students in authentic activities that attempt to simulate the ways how…

Students' learning experiences shape their perceptions of effective learning practices, and these perceptions affect the effort and approaches students engage in when in a learning environment. The type of learning environment students engage with may vary across disciplines, therefore students' perceptions may be domain-specific. Data for this…

In recent decades, higher education institutions have been increasingly called upon to prepare students for work after college. STEM programs in particular have been provided with increasing federal- and institutional-level support in order to meet the demands of a competitive global marketplace as well as to provide revenue generation for…

Some scholars speculate that humanities education, as compared to STEM education, may be better able to provide students with the most in-demand twenty-first century workplace skill: innovation. Due to the lack of empirical research on this topic, this study compares US humanities and STEM students' college gains in their 'propensity toward…

This investigation examines English as foreign language college interdisciplinary and intercultural differences in learning strategy use and their implications for language processing. Positivism underpins this research at the levels of ontology (standardized variables), epistemology (detachment from the subjects) and methodology, using nomothetic…

What does it mean to be a graduate student and to "do" graduate school? What happens when we shift our focus away from learning as a process of gaining expertise in a field or being socialized into the literacy conventions of a discipline and instead consider the ontological component of learning--the idea that learning entails becoming a certain…

This publication contains the papers presented at the 5th Annual Conference of National Academy for Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (NAIRTL) and the 9th Galway Symposium. Presenters from across Ireland and overseas share their perspectives. The theme of engagement touches on the very heart of what a "higher" education…

The original grounded theory was derived from a sample of junior and senior science and engineering majors. The current study tested the original grounded theory with a new set of juniors and seniors who were, in contrast to the original sample, primarily studying the liberal arts. In this qualitative analysis, the authors sought to determine if…

Scholars have studied epistemological development--or how one understands knowledge and knowing--of college students for many years. Research in this domain has included benchmarking studies of epistemological development, examinations of how curricular innovations impact epistemology, and some studies of differences in epistemological development…

Discusses classical theory as a modernist endeavor to apprehend the phenomenon of "unity of disunity." Presents three ways that classical theory approaches the philosophy views of Durkheim, Marx, and Weber. Concludes that postmodernism validates the relevancy of classical theory. (CFR)