The majority of the existing studies on the entrepreneurship tend to adopt the quantitative approaches to explore the effect of the preset variables and/or to examine the relationships between different variables. However, such an approach is too static and neglects the dynamics and complexity of the environment. Therefore this research tempts to analyze the entrepreneurship story by the narrative inquiry method in the hope to explain a different landscape of entrepreneurship researches and entrepreneurial organizations. The case of this research is a chain cram school. Based on the experiences and stories from the cram school¡¦s founder, managers and teachers, accompanying with the points of view adopted from ¡§Human Playful Entrepreneuning¡¨ as well as the explanation and introspection of the author, five features of an entrepreneurial organization are uncovered. That is, an entrepreneurial organization is an ever-changing organization; an organization playing with boundaries; a changing organization with regularity; a ¡§Gong-ho¡¨ organization; and an organization with a group of knowledge workers who are organizationally assimilated. An entrepreneurial organization could only survive and accommodate to a dynamic environment by attracting new employees with various knowledge, by accumulating and exploiting internal resources, and by continuous interaction with the external environment. An entrepreneurial organization is able to keep some principles despite of its continuous changes, and to keep its entrepreneurship from the faculty¡¦s partnership. When it assimilates the faculty it helps them attract each other but still maintain an innovative thinking and the ability of execution at the same time.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of elementary school students¡¦ positive emotion and assess the similarity and difference among different background students while they attending this quasi-experimental study. A nonequivalent pretest-posttest design was conducted on this study. The experimental group students who were taught by 9-weeks of ¡§Inquiry Teaching¡¨; on the other hand, the control group students who were taught by the traditional teaching method. During the beginning and end of courses, all participants conducted investigator-developed instrument ¡§Elementary School Students Positive Emotion Scale¡¨. In addition, 6 target students with more improvement scores on the post-test of positive emotion scale were recruited a follow-up interview for finding the effects of inquiry teaching project. Independent-samples t-test, paired-samples t-test, one-way ANOVA, and ANCOVA were conducted for comparing the similarity and differences between two groups. A theme content analysis was conducted to analyze the qualitative data. The major findings are as follows: 1.After the use of ¡§Inquiry Teaching¡¨, the experimental group students¡¦ self-confidence score is significantly higher than the control group¡¦s. 2.The experimental group students¡¦ ¡§self-confidence¡¨ score is significantly higher than ¡§optimistic¡¨ or ¡§gratitude¡¨. 3.The experimental group moderate academic achievers present significantly more improvement on self-confidence than those of the highest academic achievers. According to those significant findings, educational recommendations and suggestions are also provided toward teachers and researchers who can discussfurther .

A manager¡¦s growth can reflect the type of culture, environment, and institution of an organization. In addition, great career progresses contribute to a positive growth of both the company and the manager. In the past, most research focuses on how to build up a succession planning and some studies investigate how a manager¡¦s behavior, personnel traits, and style of leadership can influence the organization. With Narrative Inquiry, this article focuses on career development of some senior managers to investigate their learning progress to help researchers remodel (review) the managers¡¦ career experiences. This research expects to reveal the managers¡¦ roles and styles. Besides, the findings will lay bare their behavior and cognition with the organization through their own narratives. The environment and opportunities created by the organization motivate the managers to keep learning in their careers. Furthermore, the managers usually make good use of the challenges they have faced to experiment their concepts in action so as to obtain experiences for transforming their opinions and action. The managers¡¦ learning progresses, which have a great impact on their cognition and construction of the roles they play, also shows that learning behavior and construction of role will be interactive. The research purports to illustrate the forces and factors that will impact the managers in their careers in the organization and help the organization to build an appropriate environment beneficial both to the managers and the companies they work for.

There has been an influx of funding in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) allocated to adapting educational systems that engage, motivate and train learners with new and innovative techniques. This exploratory research project investigated the student outcomes associated with undergraduate biology learner' engagements in the ER Project. Thirty-one students interacted in small groups within an inquiry-learning environment supported by an innovative technology that introduced a database of images of green florescent endoplasmic reticulum and golgi apparatus. The aim of the ER Project was to increase learners' conceptual understanding of cell structure and movement and engage in scientific processes in an authentic inquiry setting. To identify relationships between and among independent and dependent variables in a causal model hypothesizing relationships among Prior Knowledge, Learning Preference, Attitudes toward Computers, Inquiry Task Performance and Conceptual Understanding were tested using path analysis. The study found that while prior knowledge was a strong predictor for conceptual understanding, it was not as effective for observing the inquiry task performance. But, the Motivation towards Computers and their Inquiry Task Performance indicated that learners understood the scientific processes and were able to communicate their results.

The main purpose of this study was to explore the influence of using "scientific inquiry ability scoring rubric" to be the learning scaffold and self-assessment stratagem in experiment curriculum on students' scientific inquiry ability. A quasi-experimental study was implemented in a university for one semester. Of the two classes participated in this study, one received the designed teaching stratagem and the other the traditional experiment curriculum. Students' reports were scored and sufficient data of quality were collected after each experiment to test the differences of the two classess, further analysed the self-assessment data and learning-questionnaire to assess students¡¦ perceptions. In addition, the influence of students' motive on learning was also investigated. The results obtained from this study are summarized as follows: 1. Among six abilities studied those belonging to "Nature of scientific inquiry" and "Communication"¡]¡¨forming a question¡¨, ¡¨the completeness of procedures¡¨, ¡¨the sufficiency of data¡¨, ¡§the organization of data¡¨, ¡§transferring data¡¨, ¡§reviewing and evaluating¡¨¡^had a greater progress under this stratagem. 2. Students changed step by step on four inquiry-ability dimensions (i.e., bring up self inquiry questions, try to transfer data to improve science communication etc.) during this investigation period. 3. The correlation between assessments of teachers' and those of students' increased gradually, but there was no significant difference in performance between hit and miss self-assessors. 4. Students had positive attitudes toward the self-assessment questionnaire. About 80¢Mstudents accepted that using the rubrics was beneficial for learning."Attitude" and "Science Learning Value" are the two items of students' motive that showed significant relation with their learning effects.

Now, companies all around the world are facing growing and fierce business competition. In order to save costs and raise revenues, companies adopt more flexible and temporary strategy to hire employees, which called ¡§atypical employment¡¨. This research applied the methodology of ¡§narrative inquiry¡¨ to discuss my experience as atypical worker. As both a story-teller and a student, I want to write down what I had experienced, what I had observed and what I had been inspired. Hope what I learned could bring something new and different to the industry and the academic circle. Before entering NSYSU, I had worked at Acer Incorporated as a business assistant for two years and it was also my first job. At that time, the concept of dispatched worker was not well-known and I took the job ignorantly. In Acer, I had been through two different positions and it allowed me to have varied views and know better about atypical employment in Acer. Through pondering my past experience and writing my thesis, here are my research goals and findings. First, reexamine what I had learned and discovered as an atypical worker, employ ¡§narrative inquiry¡¨ to record the story and try to gain some valuable introspection. Second, provide companies and dispatched agencies which were interested in ¡§atypical employment¡¨ with details, obstacles and problems that might happened in atypical employment. Last but not least, as an exploratory study, supply first-hand materials for the academic circle to discover more useful and worthy phenomenon or information to peruse.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--West Virginia University, 2009. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 152 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 128-134).

This study investigates the effect of communication channel (e.g., face-to-face, written) and management information (i.e., background information on the reliability of client personnel) on auditors’ judgments of evidence persuasiveness in a management inquiry setting. Management information directs auditors to focus on the source of the evidence, creating a goal of assessing management during evidence collection. Auditors are distracted away from the evidence when the communication channel presents management characteristic cues (i.e., face-to-face), unrelated to the message and related to their new unconscious goal of assessing management. By comparison, when evidence is communicated by a channel that does not provide additional management characteristic cues (i.e. written), auditors are better able to evaluate the evidence without distraction. I predict an interaction effect, where communication channel effects auditor judgments when management information is provided, but not otherwise. I design a 2x2 between-participants experiment to test my theory and present results of an experiment with 122 practicing senior auditors. Auditor participants receive an explanation from a client’s assistant controller to explain an unexpected fluctuation in a financial ratio. I manipulate the means by which the assistant controller communicates with the auditor (communication channel) and the presence of background information about the assistant controller (management information). Results of my experiment indicate an interaction effect of the communication channel and management information. When management information is provided, auditors assess the evidence as more persuasive when communication is face-to-face versus text. Auditors not receiving management information do not assess the evidence any differently, irrespective of communication channel. I also find evidence that auditors assess management differently when management information is provided. The results suggest that auditors are focused more on evaluating management when communicating through face-to-face versus written channels. Further, these assessments of management are consistent with the pattern of persuasiveness, indicating that they use this information more in their judgments when communicating face-to-face versus text and only when management information is provided. The results of this research suggest auditors may be assessing evidence as more persuasive than merited when management information is present and auditors are communicating with management face-to-face. Auditors as well as regulators should be aware of this effect so that adjustments can be made. Future researchers should consider these results in future research on management inquiry.

This study is an exploration of the lived experiences of three secondary teachers who have developed innovative approaches to English education in response to the needs of diverse, multi-literate urban students. The research marries multiliteracies pedagogy with narrative inquiry, and explores themes and discourses in the teachers’ narrations of their practices. From the new perspective developed from this pairing emerge two significant findings. First, the study contributes to teacher development by synthesizing concepts of design in multiliteracies pedagogy and personal practical knowledge in narrative inquiry. From this synthesis arises the notion of the intentional design of personal practical knowledge occurring through self-directed professional learning that leads to innovation in teaching. Second, the study develops the concepts of interacting narratives and professional knowledge landscape, offering a method of analyzing the multifaceted interactions of Self and Other narratives in the context of a professional knowledge ecosystem. This method provides a specific framework for contextualizing interacting narratives and provides a new clarity of focus in narrative research texts.

This study is an exploration of the lived experiences of three secondary teachers who have developed innovative approaches to English education in response to the needs of diverse, multi-literate urban students. The research marries multiliteracies pedagogy with narrative inquiry, and explores themes and discourses in the teachers’ narrations of their practices. From the new perspective developed from this pairing emerge two significant findings. First, the study contributes to teacher development by synthesizing concepts of design in multiliteracies pedagogy and personal practical knowledge in narrative inquiry. From this synthesis arises the notion of the intentional design of personal practical knowledge occurring through self-directed professional learning that leads to innovation in teaching. Second, the study develops the concepts of interacting narratives and professional knowledge landscape, offering a method of analyzing the multifaceted interactions of Self and Other narratives in the context of a professional knowledge ecosystem. This method provides a specific framework for contextualizing interacting narratives and provides a new clarity of focus in narrative research texts.