How does one effectively and ethically conduct research with community members who are steeped in histories of economic and social dependency, so that the people themselves take charge of their futures? This question is explored in a Canadian context as the authors study the potential of new technologies to bring hope to traditional coastal…

Teachers have had a long-honored standing in Chinese history. Yet the formal education of teachers is a relatively new development. This article reviews the historical development of teacher education in modern China and its current provisions. A number of issues pertaining to the preparation of teachers for both adults and children are examined.…

Recently activities surrounding the integration of Aboriginal cultural knowledge, content, and perspectives into the school curriculum have increased in an attempt to increase school success and retention among Aboriginal students. But how do public school teachers, mainly non-Aboriginal and belonging to Canadian mainstream culture, perceive this…

This study examines the finances of students from rural and urban regions of Newfoundland and Labrador studying at Memorial University of Newfoundland. A sample of 722 senior full-time students was selected, and 439 of these students were interviewed by telephone. Statistical analysis of the data found that the two groups were significantly…

The struggle, or interrelationship, between [authoritative and internally persuasive] discourses, determine the history of an individual's "ideological consciousness." (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 348) The "ideological consciousness" of 11 elementary schoolteachers in a linguistically and culturally heterogeneous school about meanings of social…

Recent literature on parcel indicators in measurement models used in covariance structural modelling has mainly been concerned with statistical properties of parameter estimates. Less attention has been paid to measurement properties for inferring the assumed latent construct. The present study illustrates a two-facet measurement model that…

This paper reports a case study in which 53 adult refugees initiated their own forms of learning with the aim of strengthening their opportunities for integration into Swedish society. The overall research interest was to find out what theoretical implications can be drawn from a case study where two different forms of learning were implemented.…

This article explores conditions for discussing what it means to be professional among teachers, pre-school teachers, nurses, and social workers. From an epistemological point of view it explores how analytical strategies can frame in sufficiently complex ways what it means to be a professional today. It is assumed that at least four main issues…

The aim of the present study was to further investigate the properties of a "quantitative" factor previously identified in the "diagrams, tables and maps" subtest of SweSAT. The analyses were carried out with a structural equation modelling technique on the spring 1991 version of SweSAT with 19-year-old test takers and were replicated on four…

The purpose of the present paper is to emphasise the importance of inferences in an empirical study and to demonstrate how the inferences depend on a wider context. For that purpose a metamodel of central inferences is proposed, where each inference is characterised according to three dimensions: relevance, legitimacy, and validity. The relevance…

Relatively little is known about students' conceptions of research and, in particular, whether there are conceptually discrete patterns of variation that can be used to model this phenomenon in terms of research-as-learning outcomes. The present study explores the dimensionality of students' conceptions of research from two complementary research…

This study describes how medical and nursing students develop their conceptions and understanding of science during 3 years of study at the academic level. The point of departure is the students' commonsense conceptions at the start of the undergraduate programme, which are seen as alternative ways of thinking to the more theoretical explanatory…

A well-developed and researched conceptual framework exists for identifying undergraduate students' conceptions of learning. In addition, research has been reported on teachers' conceptions of teaching as they relate to their conceptions of learning. The research reported in this paper takes the existing framework into a new area, postgraduate…

This paper examines university social science and education students' views of research methodology, especially asking whether a negative research orientation towards quantitative methods exists. Finnish (n = 196) and US (n = 122) students answered a questionnaire concerning their views on quantitative, qualitative, empirical, and theoretical…

The purpose of this research was to look for possible benefits and drawbacks of the use of computer-supported simulation in the teaching and learning of experimental research methodology and statistics. In the study three research methodology groups were compared. The results show that there were significant differences in favour of the…