Search results

This research examines the influence of parents on students studying the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines and entering STEM careers. Participating youths were awarded scholarships from large funded US grant programmes. Cases of two graduate students (one female, one male) and one undergraduate student (male) are featured. The first two students in the convenience sample are biology and physics majors in a STEM teacher education program; the third is enrolled in computer science. National reports emphasizing the importance of parents on their children's education are presented, along with diverse international literature. The use of narrative in STEM curriculum and narrative inquiry in STEM research are also documented. Experience, story, and identity form the study's conceptual frame. The narrative inquiry research method employs broadening, burrowing, and storying and restorying to elucidate the students' academic trajectories. Incidents of circumstantial and planned parent curriculum making surfaced when the data were serially interpreted. Other noteworthy themes included: (1) relationships between (student) learners and (teacher) parents, (2) invitations to inquiry, (3) modes of inquiry, (4) the improbability of certainty, and (5) changed narratives = changed lives. While policy briefs provide sweeping statements about parents' positive effects on their children, narrative inquiries such as this one illuminate parents' inquiry moves within home environments. These actions became retrospectively revealed in their adult children's lived narratives. These small stories, while not generalizable, map how students, shaped by their parents' nurturing, enter the STEM disciplines and STEM-related careers through multiple pathways in addition to the identified pipeline.

Organizational wrongdoing researchers often look to past cases to empirically develop and support theoretical understanding. Their research is therefore conducted at a temporal distance to focal events and frequently relies on retrospective accounts and surviving documentary evidence. These methodological circumstances define historical research practice, and we demonstrate in this paper the valuable insights that historical approaches can provide organizational wrongdoing research. Specifically, we draw on a range of practices from history and the social sciences to introduce four historically informed approaches: narrative history, analytically structured history, historical process study, short-term process study. We differentiate these based on their particular affordances and treatment of two key methodological considerations: historical evidence and temporality. We demonstrate the specific value these approaches represent to organizational wrongdoing research with several exemplars showing how they have been used in related fields of research.

In this book it was proposed that autistic females and African American autistics are usually not participants in autistic research because they rarely receive an autism diagnosis. If diagnostic services were made more congenial for autistics from these groups, then the prospect of them being diagnosed as autistic and being available to be research participants would increase. To help achieve this outcome, this chapter begins by presenting some typical barriers that autistics encounter when trying to access autism diagnostic services. This is followed by an explanation of some consequences of this exclusion for autistics, their families and the research community. In an attempt to mitigate these consequences, and to increase the pool of potential autistic candidates for research, this chapter concludes with a series of suggestions to improve the public's accessibility to autism diagnostic services as well as suggestions for improving the autism diagnostic process for both children and adults.

The contribution that this chapter makes to the field of autism spectrum research is to provide clinicians with some important concepts that will help autistics feel valued and accepted during the diagnostic process. A potential flow-on effect of this knowledge is that more autistics who have experienced feeling valued and accepted by clinicians will be more inclined to be involved in research.

This chapter overviews the articulation of inquiry in the three International Baccalaureate (IB) levels, Primary Years (ages 3–12), Middle Years (11–16), and the Diploma Program (16–18) that is widely accepted by universities for matriculation. It reviews inquiry-based instruction in the publicly available IB research literature. The IB advocates inquiry as its pedagogical approach. We identified empirical classroom research involving IB teachers or students from four databases; 35 reports matched inclusion criteria and 31 of these had appeared in gifted-education journals. The IB’s inquiry philosophy, interdisciplinary emphasis, and specific elements in the Diploma Program such as the Theory of Knowledge course, a program entitled Creativity, Action, and Service, and the Extended Essay, comprise qualities that should inform higher education. There has been disproportionate attention to the planning part of inquiry (e.g., generating worthy questions and deciding how to answer them) versus enactment or reflection; this leaves room for other research input about enacting inquiry in university instruction that creates a cycle of creative engagement. Successful IB experiences, through some of the IB pedagogy and content, raised learners’ expectations about their higher education learning experiences. However, as one moves from the Primary Years through to the Diploma Program, students report increasing “teaching to the test” and content-coverage that constrain inquiry opportunities students value. The importance of providing detailed, supportive, step-by-step introductions to inquiry, and attending to the social and emotional correlates of the substantive learning, were highlighted.