This dissertation focuses on stakeholder relationships and an organization’s commitment to communities, and ultimately, corporate social responsibility. The relationship between corporations and the community stakeholder is being investigated for a number of reasons. First, the concept of corporate social responsibility suggests an organization has responsibilities beyond increasing operating profit and satisfying stockholders to addressing issues of society as a whole. Are organizations responsible to communities and society? If so, how and with whom do organizations attempt to address societal needs and issues? Second, stakeholder theorists suggest an organization’s social responsibility is achieved, in part, by paying attention to all stakeholders of the organization, stakeholders including the community. Using a narrative approach as a guide, this study addresses the question of whether organizations consider the community a stakeholder. In most cases, as the iv reader will see, the answer is yes. Yet, knowing organizations do consider the

To be successful in their careers, business graduates need to be able to use the computer as a tool to solve problems and to make decisions. This study investigated the effectiveness of a commonly used systematic approach to teach database application skills. Qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed that after five weeks of step-by-step instruction, students were not able to transfer their database application skills to support the processes of solving a realistic business problem. Lack of retention and the inability to apply the appropriate procedures to support problem solving were the main difficulties; in turn, students either made poor conclusions or were unable to make any conclusion. We identify implications for technology educators and authors of learning materials.

This thesis is dedicated to my wife Gail and my children, Mark and Lauren. They have watched me spend endless hours at the computer instead of with them. They have shared in my journey and always helped me when the road was hard. They have sacrificed as much, if not more, than I have. I hope this work justifies their support. ii This study examines the ability of online distance education courses using CMC and constructivist assessment tools to support cognitive presence and deep learning. Four online focus groups were conducted, three among graduate students and one among instructors who have respectively taken and delivered online courses in the Master of Distance Education program at Athabasca University. Transcripts of the focus groups were analyzed with the objective of developing a grounded conceptual model. The learning experiences, as described by the participants themselves, have shown that deep learning and

Statistics education in psychology often falls disappointingly short of its goals. The increasing use of qualitative approaches in statistics education research has extended and enriched our understanding of statistical cognition processes, and thus facilitated improvements in statistical education and practices. Yet conceptual analysis, a fundamental part of the scientific method and arguably the primary qualitative method insofar as it is logically prior and equally applicable to all other empirical research methods—quantitative, qualitative, and mixed—has been largely overlooked. In this paper we present the case for this approach, and then report results from a conceptual analysis of statistics education in psychology. The results highlight a number of major problems that have received little attention in standard statistics education research.

Biographical Statement: Judi Harris is a faculty member in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Texas at Austin, where she teaches courses in constructivist inquiry and instructional design. Her research and service focus upon the design of curriculum-based telecollaboration/teleresearch and professional development in educational telecomputing. Jeff Pryor works in Marketing at Power Computing Corporation, and is interested in effective models for user support in personal computing. Sharon Adams is a researcher with the Southwestern Educational Development Lab, and is interested in the intersections between information science and instructional design. Author’s Note: Special thanks to Greg Jones, who collaborated with me to begin the work that inspired this investigation. Thanks also to the members of our writing-forpublication group: Bonnie Elliott, Colleen Fairbanks, Elissa Fineman, Rob Linne, Sarah McCarthey, Julia Meritt, and Jo Worthy, who offered helpful suggestions in response to an early draft of this work. Intercoder Agreement 2 This article documents our wondering about and actively exploring the appropriateness of intercoder agreement in interpretive, document-based inquiry. Two differing methods for, and results of, analysis of the same data set are compared to determine which procedure provided greater credibility and methodological congruence. The data segments twice analyzed for perceived functions were electronic mail messages exchanged among elementary, middle-level, and secondary students and teachers, plus volunteer subject matter experts, all engaged in curriculum-related telementoring. A collaborative coding process, seen as a logical extension of peer debriefing, grew out of this pragmatically grounded exploration of issues traditionally conceptualized as “reliability. ” The process is shared here, along with our reasons for recommending its use. Intercoder Agreement 3

The study examined students ’ thinking processes when using database applications to solve an ill-structured business problem; it also investigated the effect of two computer interfaces (command language and menu selection) on the thinking processes. The findings revealed that subjects used a subgoal analysis method in solving the assigned problem. When computer problems were encountered, the working backward method was used. The computer problems that affected problem-solving processes included complex database procedures, insufficient knowledge on using the software, software errors, and undetected errors in execution results. Further, subjects in the command language group were more likely to skip the consideration of relevant factors for making decisions due to the complicated steps and difficult-to-remember commands required in using the interface. The computer interface affected the quality of the factors considered for decision making while solving ill-structured business problems. In today’s complex and competitive businesses, the ability to organize useful information for decision making is essential. Businesses must hire employees who are capable of thinking through a process. Therefore, one of the objectives in today’s business education curriculum is to prepare students to be able to manage, control, and effectively use information for problem solving

Consumers ’ experiences and values in conventional and alternative medicine paradigms: a problem detection study (PDS)