As theory-based evaluation (TBE) engages in situations where multiple stakeholders help develop complex program theory about dynamic phenomena in politically contested settings, it becomes difficult to develop and use program theory without ambiguity. The purpose of this article is to explore ambiguity as a fruitful perspective that helps TBE face…

Trends in attitudes to abortion in Britain are reviewed from the perspective of opinion polls and sample surveys for the half-century since the passage of the Abortion Act 1967. The public's approach to abortion is found to have been mostly 'situationalist', conditioned by the circumstances in which abortions were to be carried out, rather than…

This study sought to investigate international students' experiences with the study visa immigration policy in South Africa. The theoretical framework utilized to investigate international students' experiences with the study visa process is 'strategic ambiguity,' defined as deliberate ambiguous statements and positions for the accomplishment of…

The introduction of the virtual work environment has resulted in the creation of a new work structure where interaction between employees and leaders occurs through technological innovations such as teleconferencing, emails, and text messages. The absence of physical workspace has also created a diverse work environment with people from various…

The definition of instruction and curriculum may take on different meanings based on the purpose or interpretation whether political, social, or educational. Teaching effectively requires the skill of a knowledgeable and experienced educator. Teaching can be convincingly debated as being an art or a science or defined collectively as an art and a…

nChildren's moral judgments of resource distributions as having "fair" or "unfair" origins play an important role in early social cognition. What factors shape these judgments? The present study advances research on this question in two primary ways: First, while prior work has typically assigned children to an advantaged or…

In this article, we explore the implementation of a time-based intervention in a garden-based science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics curriculum with a 3rd-grade science class that flipped the overdetermined functions of time and overdependence on predetermined learning outcomes to cultivate a disposition of sensitivity to the…

During the Spring 2020 semester, university classes abruptly moved online in the wake of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike courses designed and implemented with an online environment in mind, this transition involved a massive and immediate migration involving faculty and students who had not prepared or registered for online course…

Fifth-grade students watched a short video and then responded to multiple-choice items, including several without correct answers. Based on computer-supported stimulated recall and semi-structured interviews, we tested three common assumptions about what students are thinking when they respond to multiple-choice items in spite of being uncertain…

Action learning coaching (ALC), a form of action learning that integrates leadership coaching, is suggested as a method and ethos to build future capacity, specifically in novice HRD practitioners. The purpose of this article is to offer an account of learning from the perspectives of novice action learners, who were new to the field of human…

Children have been reported to prefer the surface scope or "isomorphic" reading of scopally ambiguous sentences (Musolino 1998, among others). Existing accounts in the literature differ with respect to the proposed source of this "isomorphism effect." Some accounts are based on learnability considerations (e.g., Moscati &…

This paper reflects on the problems faced by refugee students during the COVID-19 pandemic (summer semester 2020) as "calouros," i.e. freshmen during their first year, in a public university in Brazil. Through a content analysis of their personal accounts, collected electronically by their teacher of Portuguese for academic purposes (the…

This case study focused on five Instructional Coaches working in public high schools. The intent of this study was to determine how these Coaches support the adult development of teachers. Three themes emerged from this study: 1) ambiguity regarding the role of Instructional Coaches impacts the performance of Coaches and the adult learners they…

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman characterizes our time as a time of "liquid modernity" (Bauman in "Liquid modernity." Polity Press, Cambridge, 2000). Rather than settled meanings, categories, and frames of reference Bauman contends that meaning is always in flux, open ended rather than closed. Given Bauman's assessment, pedagogies…

Research Findings: To test children's use of testimony of others, 3-9 years (N = 227) made judgments about a potential peer transgression in which the intentions of the protagonist were ambiguous, after hearing two different forms of testimony. The 2 forms of testimony were (a) opposing "opinion-based" testimony from an adult authority…