Now, more so than in the past, children have been deprived of the opportunity to learn and exercise effective interpersonal communication skills. Interpersonal communication skills, for elementary students, are important in the development of a student's ability to self-advocate. The purpose of this study is to identify techniques in which…

Blended learning has already become an indispensable part of education in many fields. However, the majority of existing research on blended learning has assumed homogeneity of disciplines. This study suggests that research highlighting disciplinary effects and differences is much needed to effectively develop courses and tools consonant with the…

Community colleges accommodate nearly half of all United States college students. Increased reliance upon community colleges is driven by the current economic downturn, rising costs of higher education, and changing expectations for today's workforce requiring advanced skill sets. Community colleges offer more affordable options for broader…

The interplay of the inner lives (intersubjectivity) of students and academics within a range of disciplinary cultural manifestations is a key element in the generation of student learning. This article suggests that research on student learning has yet to adequately articulate how this interplay occurs, suggesting that a focus on the influence of…

Despite the growing popularity of dual-credit courses as a college readiness strategy, numerous reviews of the literature have noted a number of important limitations of the research on the effects of dual-credit on student postsecondary outcomes. This study addressed these gaps in the literature by estimating the impact of dual-credit courses on…

The challenges of ensuring equity among partners of very different academic power and status, across continents, within complex research projects involving differing disciplines with their own norms, and balancing needs for capacity development of individuals and for institutions can be major sources of conflicts. While each of these concerns has…

Online discussion forums are often the only interaction or communication a student in an online learning environment will have with the course instructor and fellow students. Discussion forums are intended to elicit a range of thinking skills from the students, from purely social interaction to metacognition in order to achieve deep learning.…

Graduates in the areas of Science and Technology are believed to have traditionally been employed in a number of specific industries, but the recent restructuring of some industries may have affected this phenomenon. In order to examine the trends concerning employment issues in more detail, a case study was conducted by surveying employment…

Early career academia is a challenging time, particularly as academics are facing increasing pressures to excel across a range of areas. Boyer argued for the "true scholar" versed in the overlapping areas of scholarship in research, teaching, integration and engagement. Academic developers have an important role to play in assisting the…

In 2003, the Norwegian higher educational system was reformed. The reform, known as the 2003 Quality Reform, introduced changes in the teaching model and student assessment. The authors wished to study how these changes affected male and female students. Therefore, they addressed student learning outcomes, measured through examination results,…

The motivation to teach is a powerful, yet neglected, force in teaching at institutes of higher education. A better understanding of academics' motivations for teaching is necessary. The aim of this mixed-method study was to identify groups with distinctively different motivations for teaching. Six clusters were identified: expertise, duty,…

In this article we examine how students' accounts of the discipline of sociology change over the course of their undergraduate degrees. Based on a phenomenographic analysis of 86 interviews with 32 sociology and criminology students over the course of their undergraduate degrees, we constituted five different ways of accounting for sociology.…

This "self-ethnography" complements the other articles in this special issue by spotlighting a set of key challenges facing international research teams. The study is focused on the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT)-based collaboration and research team dynamics. Our diverse team, drawn from researchers…

Several authors have suggested that the contract between the university and society formulated in the nineteenth century is breaking down, and a new relation between knowledge and society is being installed. This paper investigates what is at stake in this shift by re-visiting the roots of disciplinary knowledge, examining Durkheim's social…

This article explores the issue of what academic literacies research can bring to the study of knowledge and curriculum in higher education from a theoretical perspective and by means of illustrations from a work in progress academic literacies research project in the natural sciences. It argues that reading and writing are central to the process…