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In this dissertation, I examined the experiences of QuestBridge Scholars attending three different elite universities that enroll more students from the top income quintile than from the lowest three income quintiles combined. The universities attended by participants in this study are among the few that are both need-blind and that fully meet students’ demonstrated financial need through grant and scholarship aid. Additionally, these universities have acceptance rates of no more than 10%. The QuestBridge organization’s mission is to match high-achieving, low-income students with elite institutions. Data from participants were collected through an audio and video recorded interview using a semi-structured protocol. Interviews were transcribed and then coded using an iterative open coding process to identify themes. The themes that emerged were: changing relationships with family and friends from before college, finding support while enrolled, the transition from family of origin to elite higher education, experiencing privilege, campus involvement, social belonging, navigating elite higher education, and academic adjustment and impostor phenomenon. These themes suggest that QuestBridge Scholars experience something akin to class culture shock when they enter the world of elite higher education. This study is significant because it focuses specifically on QuestBridge Scholars who have been successful at a highly selective subset of QuestBridge institutions with high income disparity, where success is defined by having reached second-semester junior status or having graduated. The focus on those who attend or attended highly selective institutions and who are succeeding suggests that these students might have insights that would smooth the path for others like them. This study may also have implications for practice for highly selective institutions that admit QuestBridge Scholars and other low-income students. Finally, in this study, I explored participants’ perceptions of socioeconomic class, with results suggesting that the transition from family of origin to elite higher education causes changes in self-perception and behavior.

Sociologists ask a myriad of questions about their cultural environment, the relationships which are formed within it, and the social products of human interaction. In recent decades, sociologists have begun to ask these questions of the scientific research community. They have been interested in identifying the social and intellectual connections which bring together scholars and their ideas, forming subcultures within academic disciplines. The present study, which follows this line of sociological inquiry, employs author cocitation analysis to identify the distinct subcultures which characterize the field of higher education research. The cocitation patterns among the twenty-one most highly cited researchers in the field are examined through multidimensional scaling, cluster analysis, and an analysis of the authors’ vitae which reveals the cognitive and social contexts of the authors’ citation careers. A unique temporal factor is introduced, dividing the scholars’ Careers into time periods based on the dates of their cited articles, in order to evaluate the extent to which author's cognitive interests and relationships change over time. The statistical analyses reveal that three dimensions and five clusters best characterize the author cocitation data. As a result of these quantitative analyses, and the more subjective analysis of the authors’ vitae, five subcultures are identified within the field of higher education research: Organizational Structure and Leadership in Academia, Impact of College Environment on Student Outcomes, Material and Nonmaterial Culture of Academia, Student Perceptions and Effective Teaching, and Hierarchy and Inequality in Education. The temporal analysis reveals that six of the authors move from one subculture to another at some point during their careers; these subcultural shifts are explained through examination of the authors’ changing research foci and career developments. The subcultures are compared on characteristics such as cluster stability, and the length and extent of influence of the subcultures on the larger culture of higher education. The unique contributions and the methodological limitations of this study are discussed, as are suggestions for further analysis of higher education research. Finally, the present methodology is reviewed in relation to its applicability to the exploration of other academic cultures, using several areas within sociology as illustrations. / Ph. D.

Whereas scholarly malcontents and naifs in late Renaissance drama represent the actual notion of university graduates during the time period, scholarly tricksters have an obscure social origin. Moreover, their lack of motive in participating in the plays' events, their ambivalent value structures, and their conflicting dramatic roles as tricksters, reformers, justices, and heroes pose a serious diffculty to literary critics who attempt to define them. By examining the Western dramatic tradition, this study first proposes that the scholarly tricksters have their origins in both the Vice in early Tudor plays and the witty slave in classical comedy. By incorporating historical, cultural, anthropological, and psychological studies, this essay also demonstrates that the scholarly tricksters are each a Jacobean version of the archetypal trickster, who is usually associated with solitary habits, motiveless intrusion, and a double function as selfish buffoon and cultural hero. Finally, this study shows that their ambivalent value structures reflect the nature of rhetorical training in Renaissance schools.

Fortunately, there are others, most notably Rosenthal (see http://class.csueastbay.edu/commsci/ASHAStudRes.htm), who provided an impetus to our own design and implementation of the research methods course in the department of communicative disorders at East Tennessee State University. Rosenthal described a graduate research course in which students designed and executed a research project within an 11-week quarter. At the completion of the course, the top student projects were selected for publication in a departmental student research journal and submitted to the California State University Student Research Competition.

This paper aims to investigate the polarization present within the Design Thinking field ofresearch. Starting off from Johansson-Sköldberg et al. (2013), who first identified the distinctionbetween the two discourses Designerly Thinking and Design Thinking in 2010, we constructed a literature review and a framework of analysis based on conception of knowledge and its relationto the advancement of a research field. We claim that root-causes of the polarization derive from different knowledge bases, which then inhibit knowledge exchange as well as production. We conclude the paper by providing a suggestion for a way forward, claiming the applicability ofEngaged Scholarship within the realm of Design Thinking to make the field of research progresscreating relevance for both practitioners and scholars.

The aim of this thesis is to comprehensively survey and evaluate scholarship, from Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) to the present, on the fate of Islamic science between the eleventh and sixteenth-centuries, and to outline a more adequate scholarly approach. The thesis also assesses the logic and empirical accuracy of the accepted decline theory, and other alternative views, regarding the fate of Islamic science, and investigates the procedural and social physiological factors that give rise to inadequacies in the scholarship under question. It also attempts to construct an intellectual model for the fate of Islamic science, one that examines the cultural environment, and the interactions among different cultural dynamics at work. Drawing upon Ibn Khaldun's theory and recent substantial evidence from the history of Islamic science, this thesis also entails justifying the claim that, contrary to common assumptions, different fates awaited Islamic science, in different areas, and at different times. For the period of Ibn Khaldun to the present, this thesis presents the first comprehensive review of both classical and contemporary scholarship, exclusively or partially, devoted to the fate of Islamic science for the period under study. Based on this review, the thesis demonstrates that, although the idea that Islamic science declined after the eleventh century has gained a wide currency, and may have been established as the preferred scholarly paradigm, there is no agreement amongst scholars regarding what actually happened. In fact, the lexicon of scholarship that describes the fate of Islamic science includes such terms as: "decline," "decadence," "stagnation," "fragmentation," "standstill," and that Islamic science "froze," to name just a few. More importantly, the study shows that six centuries ago, the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun provided a more sophisticated and complex theory regarding what happened to Islamic science, which was not utilised except in the work of two scholars. The thesis tests the adequacy of the different claims by applying them to four case studies from the history of Islamic science, and demonstrate that evidence for specified areas shows that different fates awaited Islamic science in different areas and times. In view of the fact that Ibn Khaldun's theory is six centuries old, and that evidence of original scientific activity beyond the eleventh century emerged in the 1950s, what would one expect the state of scholarship to be? One would expect that with the availability of such evidence the usage of "decline" and other single-faceted terms would begin to disappear from the lexicon of scholarship; scholars would show awareness, and criticism, of each other's work; and development of more and more sophisticated concepts would emerge that would explain the fate of Islamic science. The thesis demonstrates that this did not happen. It argues that the key problem is that, after Ibn Khaldun, there was a centuries-long gap, in which even excellent historians used simple, dismissive terms and concepts defined by a limited, but highly persistent, bundle of interpretative views with a dominant theme of decline. These persistent themes within the scholarship by which Islamic science is constructed and represented were deeply embedded in many scholarly works. In addition, many scholars failed to build on the work of others; they ignored major pieces of evidence; and, in most cases, they were not trying to discern what happened to Islamic science but were referring to the subject as part of another project. Thus, in this corpus of scholarship, one that contains the work of some of the 'best' scholars, the myth of the decline remains not only intact but also powerful. Convinced of its merit, scholars passed it on and vouched for it, failing to distinguish facts from decisions based on consensus, emotion, or tradition. There are very few noteworthy cases where Islamic science is being represented in ways that do not imply negativity. There are also some few narratives that present more complex descriptions; however, even Ibn Khaldun's complex theory, which is arguably the most adequate in the scholarship, is non-comprehensive. Some modern scholars, like Saliba and Sabra, present a challenge to the common argument that Islamic science suffered a uniform decline. However, in the absence of any significant challenges to the common claims of the fate of Islamic science, particularly that of decline, it is evident that, at the very least, the scholarship seems to offer support to the work of discourses that construct the fate of Islamic science in single-faceted, simplistic and reductive terms.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 1994. / Title from title page screen, viewed March 28, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Edward R. Hines (chair), Paul J. Baker, Ming-Gon John Lian, George A. Padavil. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 150-163) and abstract. Also available in print.

abstract: Established in 1983 by the College Board, the National Hispanic Recognition Program annually recognizes approximately 3,300 Hispanic students who scored the highest on the Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT). These top-performing high school students are recruited by U.S. universities as National Hispanic Scholars with the offer of scholarships. Few studies have been conducted in the past 20 years about National Hispanic Scholars; and none have investigated the role of the scholars' parents in their children's academic success. The purpose of this study was to address the gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive view of the scholar-parent relationship across low-income and high-income categories. The focus was on exploring differences and similarities, according to income, between the scholar-parent relationships and the scholars' negotiation of scholarship achievement and their first-year university experience. The research question was "What are the experiences of low-income and high-income National Hispanic Scholars and the experiences of their parents from the students' childhood academic achievement through their early collegiate maturation?" Topical life history was the research methodology utilized to explore the students' academic progression. Eighteen interviews were conducted, including nine student-parent pairs. The students were asked to include the parent they felt was most influential in their decision to go to college; all students chose their mother. Interviews were conducted utilizing an interview protocol; however, participants were given opportunities to fully explain their responses. Drawing from the recorded and transcribed interviews, the researcher developed narratives for each scholar and analyzed data according to existing literature. Five thematic data categories--academic progression, racial identity, scholarship award, early collegiate maturation process, and matriarchal/ child relationship progression--were further analyzed between and across income groups. The study's major finding was that parents intentionally placed the scholars in schools or facilitated strategic circumstances that would ensure their children's academic success. Parental navigation of their children's academic activities--termed "positioning"--was present in the scholars' lives from their earliest years, and findings indicate the activity contributed to the students' becoming recipients of the National Hispanic Scholars award. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ed.D. Higher and Postsecondary Education 2010

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / In this study an attempt was made to explore the challenges with regard to publications experienced by academic women at three selected Historically Black Universities (HBUs). Although based predominantly within a feminist qualitative metholodogical framework, both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used in this study. Based on the findings of the study, the recommendations illustrated participants' responses. Some of the recommendations illustrated participants' expressed need of staff development with a specific focus on training in publication skills; mentoring and support networks; assistance and support for their publishing venture at both institutional and departmental level and the development of strategies that would assist academic women in 'juggling' their personal and academic roles. / South Africa