This paper is a group critique of a qualitative nursing study entitled “Female patients with congestive heart failure: how they conceive their life situation”, by Martensson, Karlsson, and Fridlund, as published in 1998. The primary purpose of the study was to describe from a nursing perspective how female patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) perceive, or conceive, their own situation i...

One-person librarians (OPLs) are the sole information provider in their respective organizations. Continuing professional development (CPD) is vital to satisfy their own information needs and, by proxy, those of the people they serve. No research has so far been carried out to establish what CPD means to these highly specialized library workers. This article reports on some of the findings of a...

Environmental education is an important strategy in achieving environmental improvement. Previously, we have analysed school children’s conceptions of “environment” using a phenomenographic approach. An important qualitative difference was found between conceptions that treat the environment as an object and those that treat it as a relation. The findings reinforced other calls to locate enviro...

Exploring information use within everyday or community contexts is a recent area of interest for information literacy research endeavors. Within this domain, health information literacy (HIL) has emerged as a focus of interest due to identified synergies between information use and health status. However, while HIL has been acknowledged as a core ingredient that can assist people to take respon...

This paper describes a qualitative, explorative study of how students approach developing and testing concurrent programs. The study is based on interviews with students working on the final programming assignment in a concurrent programming course. We discuss the effects of the students’ approaches to constructing and testing programs on their work, how teaching can be improved to support the ...

The growing tendency away from transmissive pedagogy to a broadly constructivist pedagogy in higher education is characterised as a cultural change which lacks a strong theoretical foundation within the culture. In this paper, learning is considered from a phenomenographic perspective, which teachers can ground in their own experience of teaching and work with to gain insights into their studen...

In an on-going study, we explore the relationship between the learning of computer science and how this learning takes place. We focus on Chinese students studying in the intercultural learning environment of a master programme in Sweden. We propose a framework based in phenomenography, which accounts for the complex relationship between the computer science content and the experienced learning...

To know where they are in the environment, humans rely on their senses for information. If the environment is artificially generated then it raises the question as to what information is needed to allow humans to know their location in the environment and have a more tacit feeling of presence within it. This paper looks at the role of Virtual Environments as conceptual learning tools in Science...

Andrzej Szklarski Qualitative research a viable methodological alternative in education This article describes the foundations, establishment and development of qualitative research, which has grown into a considerable methodological option in educational science. Qualitative research is anchored in the hermeneutic tradition and its most prominent features are an interpretative approach, induct...

The increasingly widespread use of iPads in higher education (HE) brings to the forefront questions about the contribution of these computer tablets towards teaching and learning. However, there is a noticeable gap of research on the instructional potential of iPads in HE. This paper describes the first stage of a research project on the use of iPads in undergraduate art and design disciplines,...